Dear fellow Dakkaites, Dakkalings, Dakkonians or whatever our collective name is,
I have come up with what I hope is, for anyone interested, a winning plan. My main enjoyment in this hobby is in painting and modelling, rather than in gaming. At the moment, I would like to think that I am at the “decent tabletop quality” level of painting and am looking to push myself further and hopefully, at some point, take paid commissions from people.
Of course, the best way to get better is to practise, practise, practise and then practise some more. There are two main problems for me with practising: Firstly, ultimately it costs me lots of money in models and secondly, I end up painting just the models that appeal to me. This has meant that I have had to come up with an alternate solution for practising. And so, I am pleased to announce a limited offer of FREE COMMISSIONS! That’s right, I will paint your stuff for you for free! Now before you all send me your 3000 points worth of Imperial Guard that you (understandably) don’t want to paint, there are some guidelines for this offer.
• At the moment, I am looking to take just three ‘commissions’.
• Only one commission per dakkaite.
• They must be commissions for units or squads of between 5 and 10 infantry sized models. I am open to negotiation on the size of models though. If the troops you would like are of a larger size, such as Ogres or terminators, simply count each larger model as being 2 smaller models, rounding up, e.g. 3-5 Ogres would be ok, we can negotiate on mounted troops, etc.). I know some units come in boxes of more than 10 models and, in these cases, I would be willing to paint more than 10 models for you, but would charge £2 for each additional model (£4 for larger models). That will still mean you would be getting a unit of 20 models painted for just £20, or only £12 for painting 16 models etc. This would be up to a maximum of 20 models as I think this is the most you get in a standard unit or squad box. Again, with the models that come as standard on larger base sizes, this would mean that I'd be willing to paint up to a total of 10 terminators or whatever. So to clarify, I will paint 5-10 standard base size troops for free for you, with up to another 10 painted, costing £2 each. I will paint 3-5 larger base size troops for free for you, with up to another 5 painted, costing £4 each. Make sense?
• Anything you want me to paint is ok, in theory, whether it comes from
WH40K,
WHFB,
LOTR, Blood Bowl, Necromunda,
BFG etc. and I'm willing to paint Forgeworld miniatures too, if that's what you'd like. Of course, I'm willing to paint models from other companies too, as long as I can get hold of the models, although if you want them painted according to a scheme for a non-
GW game, you would need to give me very clear instructions as I'm not familiar with other systems and paint schemes.
• I will not simply be painting the first three commissions that come to me, but the first three commissions that
interest me. What I mean by this is that I don’t want to do three identical commissions for three different people. Similarly, I might refuse your commission idea simply because I don’t fancy painting 10 identical termagaunts, for example. The best thing is just to make a suggestion and see if I go for it. (I have nothing against painting termagaunts, if that's what you'd like painted, it just depends on how I feel the day you suggest it!)
• The models will be painted to a good tabletop standard, not a Golden Demon winning standard. In my initial thoughts about taking paid commissions in the future, I have thought of having two ‘levels’ of painting – one for troops and one for individual models. These initial commissions will be based around me finding the best way of working on that troop ‘level’. If you don’t like how I paint them for you, you can always paint over them or strip them, but I would try and keep you posted with how they are coming on, hopefully with photos in a painting blog here on DakkaDakka so that you can see the progress and make suggestions as they are being painted. Essentially, I want to get this right and paint the models that
you want.
• I am willing to paint the models in any colour, pattern or scheme that you want (within reason) and will seek to get descriptions from you that are as detailed as you can make them. The more information you can give me about how you want them painted, the better. If you just say "Goffs colours", that's fine, but I won't know that you've painted the rest of your army with a red tattoo on their arm, unless you tell me.
• Whilst I will do the painting for free and absorb the cost of the paints themselves, I do not want to be out of pocket for this. As such, I will charge you for any postage costs and a small charge for the packaging materials to send the models to you. I live in the
UK if that helps, although I’m more than happy to post them anywhere in the world, provided you pay postage and packing.
• You can either send me the models or I can go out and buy them for you. If I am buying the models for you, then I will obviously charge you for the price of the models. In order to cover either the cost of me having the models posted to me, or my petrol to go and buy them from my
FLGS, I will keep any additional bits in the boxes rather than posting them back to you with the painted models. I won’t charge you for anything until the models are completed and ready to be posted, unless you have asked me to buy more than £15 of models, in which case I will ask for half of the cost of the models to be sent to me before I buy them (I don't want to be left with a load of expensive models if you decide at some later date that you don't want them. I'm trying to be sensible in how I approach this.). If you want to use bits from other units, I can use online bits sellers, or buy other boxed sets, depending on what works out cheapest. I shall post your miniatures to you as soon as I have painted them and I have received any money that you owe me.
• I am very happy to assemble the models however you want (as this is a part of the hobby I really enjoy), just make sure you specify what you want and I’ll gladly do it. If you don't specify anything, I'll assemble them in the way that I would want them in my army. If you have specifics about which weapons they should be holding, make sure you let me know. I am also willing to talk about conversions with you, although please don’t go suggesting anything too time consuming like 10 true scale space marines, or 10 chaos knights all green-stuffed to represent the warriors from ‘300’. Should conversions require extra bits, make sure you post them with the models, or that you are happy for me to charge you for having the bits sent to me. My greenstuff skill level is relatively basic, although I'm coming along with that and am very willing to try my hand at most things, within reason! In fact, now that I come to think about it, one thing I'd be really interested in doing is converting some models up for a blood bowl team, although this would clearly need a lot of discussion between me and the commissioner. If one person wanted to commission this, I'd certainly give it a high likelihood of me wanting to do it - depending on the models chosen of course!
• I will not be doing any magnetisation for you.
• I will not be doing any basing for you, although I will make sure that any paint that has got onto the base is covered over with black.
• Lastly, and most importantly, I do this as a hobby, not a job. As such, my deadlines will have to be quite flexible as I have to juggle my real job, my wife, holidays and normal life around painting time. It may take a month or two (or possibly more...) to get your commission done from the date I start it. However, I will discuss this with you individually and we’ll work something out. Essentially, if you need something painted NOW, choose someone other than me! If I do get more than one commission from this, they will be painted to completion in the order that they appear in this thread. So do bear that in mind when thinking about when your commission will be finished. I will be doing my best to complete them all in a timely fashion though.
If you've read through to this stage, you deserve a medal! I've tried to think of everything that is likely to be asked of me in attempting to provide this service and I hope that you don't feel there are too many 'rules'. I hope that this all makes sense and that we can help each other out with this. What you get out of this is a unit of models painted to a decent standard for free. What I get out of this is the chance to practise my painting skills a bit more and hopefully work on some models I wouldn’t normally think of painting. I have included some photos below of some minis that I have previously painted, so that you can get an idea of what level I'm currently painting at. There's also a few more pictures in my gallery. If this proves successful, I will hopefully be repeating this offer at a later date for three individual models, painted to a higher standard, after completing the three units. I might also, at some later stage, repeat the offer for large models and vehicles.
Please add a post to this thread if you’d like to commission me, rather than
PM’ing me, as I’ll use that for contacting whoever I am going to do some work for and I don't want to fill my inbox with queries! If you would like to commission me, make sure you include what the unit type is, how many models and a rough idea of a scheme and any other details you might like to include to catch my interest. e.g. "10 Space marine terminators, Space Wolf colour scheme". Or "5 Ogres, my own colour scheme, with shields and weapons taken from the Saurus Temple Guard unit". Or something like that. You get the idea.
Anyway, that’s enough of my blithering.
Hoping this works and that we can help each other,
Inyoka Madoda
P.S. Thanks to LBursley for reading through the draft version of this post and helping me make sure I've covered everything!
This guy's not finished yet, but you get the idea.
. But seriously, I am open to you putting your own touch on the army, it would be appreciated, but not required, I am easy to please. I'm going for somewhat of a desert themed army. Time is not really an issue, although depending upon the cost of shipping, I may not be able to afford to get these out to you until next month. But once they are there, I have no problem you taking your time on them. At my speed, you would probably still beat me if you were working on twenty and I was working on ten.
No madam, 40,000 is the year that this game is set in. Not how much it costs. Though you may have a point. - GW Fulchester 
The Gatling Guns have flamethrowers on them because this is 40k 
