How Much Can I Charge For My Art? (Illustrator)

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Hi!

I’m a freelance illustrator. I’ve had a few illustration jobs published and my portfolio is here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Leo-Shen/5385122

I’m trying to figure out how much to charge for my illustration art. I’ve searched for this information before, but there are so many factors that come into play, and most of the information online is from years ago when the industry was different.

What do you think? Have you charged for your work? What’s your experience with selling illustration art? How do you calculate your hourly rate?

I’ve been an illustrator for around 10 years, but I only started charging for my art about six months ago by selling t-shirts on cafepress.com. I want to continue charging for my art, but don’t know what to charge or how to figure it out.

I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but the majority of answers I’ve gotten are that illustrators can charge $150-$200 per hour and then multiply by 1-2 hours of work depending on difficulty of project. Is this accurate?

It seems like more people are getting into illustration these days, which makes sense

What is illustration art?

As much as I hate to admit it, it’s getting harder and harder to make a good living as an “illustrator.” The days of the $2000.00 illustration assignment are over. The reason for this is because our work has become more affordable to business owners and advertising companies. When I first started my freelance career, back in the mid-nineties, I could expect to make about $3000.00 for a full color two-page spread in a magazine or newspaper. Today, despite being much better at my craft than I was back then, and having a “bigger portfolio”, I can expect to earn less than half of that amount per project.

But how do you charge for what you do? How much should you charge? Because if you don’t know how much your time is worth, you’re going to lose money left and right. And nobody likes to lose money!

This is very interesting topic for me, because I am not artist and I have to deal with clients. Some of them are artists and they know what to charge from their clients, but they do not understand how to work with non-artists.

Telling you how much you should charge is a tricky business. There are no hard and fast rules here; it all depends on a number of factors that include the type of client, the nature of the job and your track record as an illustrator. In this article we will take a closer look at some of these factors so that you can better understand how to price your services.

Art is a beautiful way to expressing your self and ideas, but selling your art can be frustrating. Since there isn’t a normal job that you can do to pay the bills while you work on your art, you often have to just “do it for the love”. Though if you put in the hard work and dedication to make your art something that you can charge for, then you will eventually be able to get paid for doing something that you really enjoy doing.

TIP: First of all, ask yourself if this is really what you want to do for a living. If it is, then give it to it! You have to be willing to put in the time needed in order to be successful.

There are many ways that an artist can get paid for their work, such as magazines, books, commissions, galleries and online sales.

Here are some ways to sell your art:

– Magazines: contact small magazines first because they pay less money but they are easier to contact since they don’t have layers of bureaucracy through which you must pass. The big guys can be too much like a corporation with their rules and red tape. You’ll never see any of the money from the big magazines anyway so why bother? Once you get used to dealing with

The standard rate for editorial illustration is $300-550 per illustration, depending on how complex a piece it is. This includes everything from line drawings to fully rendered pieces with lots of detail and color, but the rates are pretty consistent. For example, this double spread in The New Yorker: You can see that the artist was paid $900 for the two images, and he spent about 150 hours on the project. If you were to divide those hours by that rate, you get about $6 an hour.

I’ve heard many illustrators complain about their low pay rate, but I’d like you to consider your own hourly wage if you are paid hourly at all first. If you’re a freelance illustrator who works as much as possible and averages 16-20 hours a week, making $6 an hour would put you at around $14,000 a year. That’s below the poverty line for an individual in the US with no children (though not by much!). So if someone offered you $6 an hour to do what you love doing–to be able to spend your days working on art–wouldn’t that seem like a pretty good deal?

Of course, illustrators don’t work 40 hour weeks (or even 20), but I think it’s

I’m an illustrator. I’ve been doing it for about eight years now and I’m starting to get a handle on the business side of it. This subject is a little tricky to come up with some concrete answers for, but here goes.

In this blog post I’ll try to give you a rough idea of how to value your work, and then some strategies for getting paid what you’re worth.

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