Art Material Cost Calculator

Because Medium changes two things in the formula at once: the paint coverage rate per tube (oil ~6 sq ft, acrylic ~8 sq ft, watercolor ~12 sq ft in a thin coat) and the Mediums & Solvents percentage added on top of Paint Cost (about 15% for oil, 5% for acrylic, 3% for watercolor). Oil paint therefore needs relatively more tubes to cover the same area and carries a larger solvent surcharge, so switching from watercolor to oil on an identical canvas raises Total Material Cost even though every dimension, layer count, and color count is unchanged.

No. Gesso Cost is calculated from Canvas Area alone, using a fixed two-coat primer assumption at roughly 75 square feet of coverage per quart — it represents priming the surface once before painting begins, not a per-paint-layer cost. Number of Layers instead scales Paint Cost, because more paint layers mean more total painted surface area (Canvas Area times Number of Layers) even though the underlying canvas size and the gesso needed to prime it stay the same.

No — it roughly quadruples for the paint- and gesso-related portions, because Canvas Area is Width times Height, so doubling both dimensions multiplies area by four. Gesso Cost and Paint Cost scale directly with area, so both roughly quadruple. Canvas/Support Cost, however, is entered directly rather than derived from dimensions, so it does not automatically scale with size — you need to update it yourself to reflect a larger, more expensive support.

Total Material Cost divided by Canvas Area, giving a size-normalized figure you can use to compare pricing across canvases of different dimensions — useful when deciding whether a larger commission is proportionally cheaper or more expensive per square foot to produce than a smaller one. Because Canvas/Support Cost and Gesso Cost don't scale linearly in the same way as Paint Cost across every size range, Cost per Sq Ft is not perfectly constant even for the same Medium and layer count — larger canvases typically show a somewhat lower per-square-foot cost as the fixed canvas cost is spread over more area.