When you’re pulled in ten directions at once, pricing your art — especially a new body of work right before an event — can feel impossible. The hardest part usually isn’t the math. It’s the momentum.
When Pricing Happens at the Last Minute
If you’ve ever set prices for your art the night before a show or right before you post something online, you know the scramble. You’re distracted by everything else you need to do, running out of time, and suddenly the numbers you land on don’t feel all that considered— or all that good.
One year during Open Studios, I figured I’d have a slow morning to finish deciding my prices after I opened at 10 a.m. The weeks before had been a huge lift — cleaning the studio, making new art, hanging art, and prepping every detail — so pricing slipped to the bottom of my list.
Guess who walked in first thing? The founder of the event… who’s also an art buyer. Instead of greeting them with ease, my panic about the weekend only escalated.
Lesson learned: last-minute pricing steals your focus from the people and opportunities you most want to connect with.
The Swirl of Overthinking
Pricing stress often comes from worrying if you’ll “get it right” — as if there’s a secret perfect number and you’re being graded on whether you find it. You’re not. This isn’t an A+ kind of project; it’s a progress-over-perfection kind of project.
It’s easy to get tangled in thoughts like:
“What if no one buys it at that price?”
“I don’t know what other people are charging for similar work.”
“I need to research more before I decide.”
“I’ll think about it later.”
That swirl can turn into a cycle: you want to set a fair price, you overthink it, your brain slips into overload mode — and the decision keeps getting pushed off.
What’s Really in the Way
This last-minute scramble often comes down to the same culprit: decision fatigue mixed with fear of getting it ‘wrong.’ This means you’re making pricing decisions that don’t feel as confident or thoughtful as you’d like.
And, the longer the decision sits, the bigger it looms.
A Lighter Way to Price
The way forward? Make pricing a low-stakes, repeatable process instead of a high-pressure, one-time decision.
Give yourself a simple formula or a starting price range, and treat it as something you can adjust later. You don’t need to wait a year to change your prices “annually”. Adjusting more frequently means the process carries less mental weight and lets you test and adjust as you sell.
Three Places to Start
To help with this, start with the free pricing guide here — it’s the number one way artists begin to price their artworks.
You can also:
Know the going rate — look at what similar work is selling for.
Check your past sales — use them as a jumping-off point.
Trust your gut — if you had to price your art today, what number feels right?
Write down those gut-feeling prices in a spreadsheet, Google Doc, or even your sketchbook. Writing and seeing the numbers makes them more real and easier to refine.
The “Slightly Uncomfortable” Sweet Spot
One artist shared after attending my pricing workshop that one of the most helpful takeaways was this: if you price your art to the point where it feels just slightly uncomfortable, that’s probably the sweet spot. About 95% of artists underprice their work — so that tiny bit of discomfort might be a sign you’re finally getting closer to prices that make the most sense for you.
Your art is worth putting a number on — and that number doesn’t have to be perfect to be powerful.
If you want prices you can feel confident about — and a repeatable system to set them without overthinking — let’s talk. Book your Artist Blueprint meeting now and get the clarity you need before your next show or sale.