I know nothing about the art world. I’ve been sculpting and casting and I’d like to start selling but how to you determine price? I look on Etsy and see prices all over the place. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Here are some examples of what I’ve made and the quality of casting in my limited experience of casting. They aren’t flawless, but I think they still look ok. castings are hollow and weigh between 2.5-3lbs, or a bit over a kilogram each. What is a starting price for something like this? All original work. How does art work?
Take this with a grain of salt. Art typically takes a period of time - a large chunk - so figure out what you want to make in say a day of making art - and price your pieces based on that. As an example, if you believe you need $100 a day to make art, and a piece takes you a day to do, that makes it a $100 piece. Plus you should add-in for whatever materials you expend. Doing it art - price yourself to get sales to get your name and art out, but make sure you extract enough value to keep you doing it. As your pieces get more popular, prices rise accordingly.
The piece I cast the most is the brass corpus from the brass corpus project. And after mounting one on a cross with an INRI plaque, I can sell one for $120. That is local no shipping. The high end wood I use cost at most $10. So the other $110 dollars is in the castings. And in total all of the brass I use weights only 1lb. Another thing is that I do not even have to sculpt it ahead of time. Because I have the original. It also looks like you are doing lost wax and investment casting. Where I only do green sand casting. I hope this give you something to work from. Patrick
Hey dude... The sad reality is unless you have the name behind you to command what you should be paid for all your hard work on your few pieces, you have no choice but to make a mold and pound them out in an edition. Fkers are cheap, you'll be lucky to get 150-200bucks a piece. And I KNOW how many hours you have into your work. So figure you can expect to make about 9bucks an hour doing this stuff. Maybe the dems will help and get you to that magical 15bucks an hour so you can afford a 10dollar big mac meal at shitdonalds. In all seriousness, start your etsy store, but don't price anything below 300bucks and be prepared to WAIT! If you go down, you are saying your work is cheap and not valuable and I for one do not believe that for one second. Your new chicken head is excellent! By going down, it's the fastest way to piss other artists off. Example for you. A guy calls me one day to fly his King Air on a day trip, a simple out and back. I told him I needed $550 and he gets all bent out of shape and then tells me he only gets $350 a day to fly some shitty old beechjet. That's when I tell him HE is the reason whats wrong with this industry. I don't get out of bed for less than $500. I don't give a shit what I'm flying, I get paid for the decades of experience I bring to the table. Pay me for what I know and not what I do. Just the way it is. If you don't like it, bend over real good and call a charter company. If you want an example, look at that porch light I made. IF and that's a BIG IF I got someone to buy it off me for 3k, after expenses, I'd stand to make about 14bucks an hr. Anything less than that and it can sit RIGHT HERE on this table in my house for all I care. I don't need the money and will not cheapen my time. Be sure to advertise the etsy link on your yt video and maybe someone will pay up just for the fact they have a video of it's production AND it's the ONLY ONE out there! Savvy??? If not, get out the silicone and you might get 89bucks for your chicken. We don't call them starving artists for no reason.
Rasper might be lurking. (I hope so). He's successful in the field and a personable guy. Maybe a PM to him might give you some helpful feedback.
I saw your bird head on the facebook group. Looks good. Pupils? Unsure about prices. I've never sold anything. But it is expensive to make and takes forever. I think starting out at some $ value per hr it takes you is one approach. Another is to cover expenses and make up a price that seems reasonable. My chicken took me 200+ hours to make and mold. I have no idea what people would end up paying. But I know for a fact you don't get paid what you're worth, you get paid what you negotiate for. And the art world is full of flowery bullshit verbiage that helps sell pieces of art for way more than they are worth to rich people who want to waste money.
I don't have an artistic bone in my body but after selling a few pieces that I felt were not compensating me for my work, I started pricing at $20/hour. So far, so good. Then I add on the selling costs, ebay gets 10%, paypal 3%, + shipping.
Zap is right, the art world is a 1st class shitshow. Half of it is dominated by money launders and the other half by morons that like to over pay for stuff. Selling little pieces to the average guy at affordable prices is next to impossible. Then there is the gallery route. You can watch your stuff rot in a gallery while they try to make thousands off you. Go visit a gallery that sells just bronze work. That's an eye watering experience not to be forgotten. Fritz would tell you make your living doing something else and keep art a hobby. It's a brutal business and that kid is an amazing artist. He says pricing a piece is the hardest part of the entire process. And he doesnt have the luxury of pouring his own stuff! The problem is the still the same, just add more zeros.
Seems it does, and not merely as specified beforehand: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjAAegQIBhAB&usg=AOvVaw2pJ1jLCHGVev4RHpCze6md
Funnily enough I do all my metal etching with a green cuprous chloride solution described in that article as being the culprit. Tin suffers from tin pest at low temperatures but can be remelted to recover it.
