The Ledger Under the Drawing: Pricing One Small Work Without Flinching
At a village hall in Suffolk last month, I sold a small ink drawing for £22. The buyer said, 'That's a bargain.' I smiled and said thank you. Then I went home and did the sums I usually avoid. This is not a plea for sympathy or a lecture about the morality of pricing. It is the ledger I should have kept years ago.
The £22 drawing, line by line
The example is one A4 graphite-and-ink drawing, mounted but unframed, sold from a table at a weekend craft fair. I sold eleven pieces that day, so the stall fee and travel are split eleven ways. The card fee is based on the actual £22 sale. Desk space is an allocation: a corner of the spare room, a share of electricity, and the website that keeps the lights on. It is approximate, but it is not imaginary.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| 300gsm paper | £0.65 |
| Graphite and ink | £0.35 |
| Mount board | £2.10 |
| Backing board, bag and label | £0.68 |
| Stall fee share (1 of 11 sales) | £2.27 |
| Travel and parking share | £0.55 |
| Card machine fee on £22 | £0.59 |
| Desk, electricity and website share | £1.65 |
| Direct costs | £8.84 |
| Drawing, mounting and admin (3 hours at £15) | £45.00 |
| Stall shift share (0.45 hours at £15) | £6.75 |
| Labour | £51.75 |
| Total cost | £60.59 |
| Price charged | £22.00 |
| Shortfall | -£38.59 |
If I frame it, add about £10.40 for a simple second-hand frame and glass, plus twenty minutes of fiddling. At the same £15 rate, that is another £5.00. The total rises to £75.49. A framed version at £35 would still leave a gap of more than forty pounds. Framing does not fix the maths; it just makes the maths heavier.
The hours are the point
I have spent years treating labour as the soft cost. Materials are real because they arrive in a bag. Stall fees are real because they leave my bank account. Hours are the thing I have been happy to call 'just part of it'. But three hours is three hours. If I would not clean a stranger's kitchen for free, I should not draw for a stranger's wall for free either.
The £15 an hour in this ledger is not a fancy rate. It is the lowest figure I can write down without flinching. It does not include holiday pay, sick leave, pension, or the cost of the courses and books that taught me to draw. It is a floor, not a target. Even at that floor, the £22 drawing is being sold at a substantial loss.
The costs I used to leave off
Desk space is easy to ignore because it is already there. So is electricity, broadband, the website domain, the card reader, the bag of backing boards in the cupboard. None of these arrive as a single dramatic bill. They arrive as a hundred small ones. A costing sheet is just a way of seeing them before they disappear into the general fog of life.
There is also the time around the drawing: the mounting, the labelling, the photograph, the listing, the email, the packing, the trip to the post office. I have often counted the drawing and forgotten the rest. That is how a two-hour sketch becomes a three-hour job without anyone noticing. The drawing is not the whole product. The drawing is the centre of the product.
A copyable costing sheet
Copy this into a notebook and fill it in for one piece. Do it for three pieces if you can bear it.
- Materials: paper £; medium £; mount and backing £; bag, label and packaging £.
- Selling: stall fee ÷ number sold £; travel and parking ÷ number sold £; payment fees £__.
- Overheads: desk or room share £; electricity £; website, software or subscription £__.
- Time: making __ hours; finishing and mounting __ hours; admin and photos __ hours; stall shift __ hours.
- Your hourly rate: £__.
- Labour: total hours × hourly rate £__.
- Total cost: materials + selling + overheads + labour £__.
- Price charged: £__.
- Difference: £__.
- Optional frame: £__ plus __ hours.
The number at the bottom is not a verdict. It is information. You can respond by raising the price, reducing the cost, changing the format, making fewer pieces, or deciding that a particular piece is a gift and not a product. What you cannot do is make the gap disappear by calling it a hobby. A hobby costs money too.
The quiet rounding-down
I understand why makers round their labour down. A £60 drawing sounds like a lot in a village hall. A £22 drawing sounds like a nice afternoon purchase. We want people to say yes. We want to be part of the room. We do not want to be the person at the fair with the intimidating price list. So we shave off an hour here, a material cost there, and eventually we shave ourselves down to zero.
But the odd thing about rounding down is that it does not stay private. It sets a signal. It tells the next maker that £22 is the going rate for an A4 drawing. It tells the buyer that the hours are not part of the thing. It tells me, quietly, that my time is the least valuable material on the table.
I am not arguing that every drawing must be £60 or that every fair must become a luxury boutique. I am arguing that the calculation should happen before the price tag, not after the sale. I want to know what I am choosing when I choose £22. I want to know whether I am subsidising a hobby, buying an audience, or simply making a mistake. The ledger does not make the decision for me. It just stops me pretending there is no decision to make.
The pencil line looks free because it is thin. The hours behind it are not.
