Yep, I just looked at some old invoices. This is pretty typical of a successful edition of 100.
A woman had a popular watercolor of downtown Chapel Hill (UNC campus), the imaging (photography on 4x5, film scan, color correction, proofing) was $625. Each 17" x 22" print (Giclee) on archival watercolor paper, trimmed out for mounting was $36. Even though she only had 10 printed to start, she figured her cost based on an edition of 100 prints. So her cost from me would average $42.25 per print. Framing each print supposedly costed her ~$40 (ugliest frames you ever saw!) so her cost per framed print was figured at $82.25 for the whole edition. 6X that is $493.50. She sells them for $500 each at shows. Galleries sell them for $650 but she typically only gets between $260 and $325 of that. Her originals sell for $800 to $3000.
Those prints go like hotcakes around Christmas, I sold 4 at $500 each just to customers who walked in and saw'em in process. We finished printing the other 90 within a month. She did an edition of 100 9"x12" prints for a gift shop a few months later. That particular artist was successful with 2 other editions, paintings of a frat house and a historic house, both related to UNC. The frat house was 500 prints and she sold them all to one guy (unframed, in tubes) who uses them to raise funds for the Alumni Association.
I had several artists who did the first 10 prints and never printed any more.
2 or 3 of these a month was all that ever came through. Did tons of digital reproductions with the D1X though, for publications, cards, invitations and stuff.
I got out of that business last year... artists are impossible to deal with. They always expect the print to duplicate the original exactly and that only happens with certain pieces on certain media... I don't care what fancy French name you hang on it, and inkjet's an inkjet and it will not reproduce the gamut of oil paint... Oy! I sure learned my color correction doing that stuff though... actually, shooting art taught me a lot about photographic color, managing reflections and precision lighting.
I still shoot art but once the film's processed, I'm done, it's a dying business for small shops. There are big Giclee houses now that do limited editions cradle to grave with scanning cameras and dozens of printers a lot more efficiently.
Sorry, got off track there.
Another way you can look at it is by the square foot. Think $25 per square foot (east coast prices) as your cost for archival printing, make sure you include the border. Use a professional digital printing bureau and give them exactly what they ask for in terms of reference print, size, resolution and color profile... make sure they let the prints cure for a couple of days and then coat'em with Bulldog (that's one way to tell if they know what they're doing or not). Keep a reference print along with the digital file it was printed with (not your file, THEIR file) for yourself in an archival envelope in your basic cool dry location. That way you can prove that it CAN be done exactly that way so subsequent printings will match.
Art is a trip. Pricing, in some ways, actually determines popularity. You want to be on the high side or people will diss on you. Sometimes, if your prices are really high, people are quicker to take notice. If you want to make money at it, you need to hang in galleries. Some saavy gallery owners will coach you and do openings and things to promote you... it's a weird sort of social scene, takes a lot of commitment to do it right though... wear black.
This is as close as I've gotten to 'The Moyle Style'...
Chip
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