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Making Money as an Artist

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

Last Updated On: 2026-02-15 08:01:34 -0500

Disclaimer: I think most if not all artists are going to hate me for writing this. Now that I’ve written this, I see that it is a disturbingly mechanistic approach to the creation of art. And I apologize for that. However I have spent most of my life selling my work as a consultant and that means that I sell my soul by the hour. And isn’t that ultimately what an artist does?

I am not an artist.

I am not talented artistically.

I have close to zero artistic skills.

I am an engineer and I’ve been a consultant much of my career.

However I am actually pretty damn good at business and making money so this is a business person’s perspective on making money as an artist.

Let’s Do Some Math

If what you do is sell your time in the world then you need to understand what I call hourly time math. There are two obvious cases:

Full Time Work

A full time job is generally defined as 40 hours per week. If you assume that you work 50 weeks out of the year then that means you have a time budget of 2,000 hours.

Part Time Work

Let’s say that you already have a full time job and that takes up 40 hours per week. There are 168 hours per week so now your time budget for part time art work is 128 hours. But you normally need to sleep 8 hours per day so that 7 * 8 or 56 hours which means you have 72 hours left. But that’s for everything in your life so maybe you can afford to dedicate 20% of that remaining time to art. And that gives you a time budget of 14 hours per week or 700 hours per year.

Using Your Time Budget

Once you know your time budget then you need to figure out how much time you take, on average, for a given type of artwork. Let’s say, for example, that you are a painter and it takes you 10 hours start to finish for a given work. Please note that I am NOT a painter and I have no idea if that’s even remotely too much or too little. But it is a nice number with which to do math.

If you are working on a full time basis as per above then you can make 2000 / 10 paintings a year or 200 paintings.

If you are working on a part time basis as per above then you can make 700 / 10 paintings a year or 70 paintings.

Assuming that your costs are relatively low that means that your ability to profit from your art is 200 * price per painting or 70 * price per painting.

This of course assumes that you sell everything you make which any artist knows isn’t true.

So let’s assume that you sell 50% of what you make and the rest goes into a back collection. That means that your profit is selling either 35 or 100 paintings a year.

Now if you assume that you can see your paintings for $100 each that means that you are making $3,500 to $10,000 per year.

I don’t know whether these numbers are good or bad. And I do know that a lot of art sells for much more – heck I’ve spent a lot more than this on art but I suspect that art is a particularly long tail and most art never sells at all.