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I did this one for someone locally... My friend says I undercharged for it, but I'm just starting commission work and have no idea what to charge folks... especially if I want repeat customers. If anyone has any comments on that, let me know.

Anywho... my first pic to toss up here

Looks good, personally I don't think the charge for painting should exceed the cost of the model so in this case around $100.

It's disgusting...I love it!

Cool .. how long did it take you to paint it ?

Care to post some additional photograph angles? I would love to see a side shot. Looks good from here. How much did you charge?

This one angle looks really nice, but lets see some more shots.

Looks awesome, have you got any shots of it from different angles?

A Strange Man wrote:Looks good, personally I don't think the charge for painting should exceed the cost of the model so in this case around $100.

That's quite a bad way to do your pricing... so a cheaper character model of say 15 dollars should only cost that much in a commision despite taking several hours to complete? Just charge a price/hour that you are happy with. Consider how much time it took you to paint up, and the final price. If the amount of cash you ask per hour is doable, you should be fine.

I was testing interest before I made this too pic heavy ^^ here, let me toss a few up... and I'll amend the title so people don't get trapped in download >.>

Oh, details too... it was about 25-40 work hours... I lost track and just got into too many painting grooves... over the course of 3 weeks after work... no weekend work (hence the wide berth in time). I charged 95$...

Elmir wrote:

A Strange Man wrote:Looks good, personally I don't think the charge for painting should exceed the cost of the model so in this case around $100.

That's quite a bad way to do your pricing... so a cheaper character model of say 15 dollars should only cost that much in a commision despite taking several hours to complete? Just charge a price/hour that you are happy with. Consider how much time it took you to paint up, and the final price. If the amount of cash you ask per hour is doable, you should be fine.

You sir are wrong ! as is that other guy . You cant pay per hour and the reason for that is becaus the buyer has no way of confirming the painter has worked on that figure for x hours . What the buyer should do is look at the painters gallary and if he decides to commision a figure he should then agree a price with the painter depending on the figure , its that simple.

nicely done for a first commission piece...
definitely a hell of a big project to jump in with...

@A Strange Man: surely your formula should be adjusted for the quality of a painter's work...
some paintjobs actually devalue a mini in a lot of peoples opinion, while some paintjobs make a mini a valuable masterpiece...
this guy charged about 2X the value of the mini which seems very fair from a guy just getting his foot in the door, but obviously has some skills...
my commission rates average about 15X the cost of the mini, but i have the resume and a style that my clients are looking for, and they always feel like they get more than their value for the money...
plus i've spent 8 solid years building up the rates, and gathering the clients who want my pieces, yet i still have 2 years left in my business plan before i get to where i want to be as a Display Only commission painter...
i started out painting single minis for $35 in the industry, now i average 10X that...

@Elmir: charging by the hour never made sense to me, because if you have put in the hours you agreed upon, and still aren't happy with the result, could anyone really, in good conscience, just stop and send out the mini???

i find charging by the size of the base to be a good starting point, as it is an easy way to measure how big a mini will be in hand...
25mm = X amount
40mm = X amount
60mm = X amount
and so on...
then you can add any others fees for conversions, freehand, and quality level...

@oOshottyOo: you are right, but it's not about worrying that the painter will put in less work, as much as it is that the painter will be screwing himself...
a mini always takes longer than you think it will...
a price needs to be agreed upon up front, so the buyer doesn't get bit in the arse when the job is done, and costs twice what he was hoping to pay...

main point is, the price should always be worked out up front, and believe me, a good painter is never getting much money when compared to the work put into a mini...

best of luck, Revarien...

cheers
jah

@Jan-joshua Thanks for the advice... I have issues determining how much work each mini will take... I've had truescale 28mm, take way longer than a 40mm... I guess it's all in the details then :/ But yeah it's a big help hearing your comments on it... I've been having everyone write down exactly anything they want on the mini and keeping it in a book, making sure to point out that if they want anything special, they need to write it down... it seems to keep everything fairly honest, imo.



Oh, I don't know if I made it clear: I charged $95 after he bought the model. So payed for the model and I told him the cost it would take to paint it...

He's seen my work before hand on other stuff... (such as my sisters of battle - which I don't really have good pics of, sadly... they're all terrible pictures of my SoB in my gallery), and my DeathWatch figures for the games I'm in. So: he talked to me about it, and I said I'd be willing to undertake it... we discussed the color scheme and everything and he settled on 'similar' to the box art, but left plenty of stuff up to me.
I wasn't too happy with the color choices that the heavy metal team came up with for the skin... color mainly because in the lore, worms used for the skin and whatnot could be even larger than this, so I figured it should be a juvenile and thus opted for the more 'pink skin' to closely represent pinkies (young mice). Also it had the affect of contrasting well with the browns used on the wheel and ground while not being too harsh or too light on the eye.

I'm not sure I'd do the reticulation the same way again... I think it's probably the weakest part of the mini... I think I'd feather it more with multiple levels of grey... also, the reticulation was absolutely all I did in the last week... I think it needed a better process honestly.

The customer was very happy and elated with the piece, telling me that he'll have 2 doom wheels for me to do soon... so I'm guessing this is exactly what he wanted, which honestly was nice to hear.

Since then, I've gotten a plague furnace to do (charging $110 because he wants everything glowy and vibrant etc.), I've gotten a gorka morka squad, a hand full of deathwatch/commander minis, the rumblings of full armies... etc... it's been a busy last couple months since I started doing these things and I'm not sure if I'm 'Doing it right' as far commissions go...

It's a big help to be able to look at the forums and talk with ya'll about it and hear your ideas/comments... especially folks that have been doing this for a while.

So I wanted to say thank you all for your comments and help!

o0shotty0o wrote:
You sir are wrong ! as is that other guy . You cant pay per hour and the reason for that is becaus the buyer has no way of confirming the painter has worked on that figure for x hours . What the buyer should do is look at the painters gallary and if he decides to commision a figure he should then agree a price with the painter depending on the figure , its that simple.

Some clarification then. Indeed you don't have a crystal ball to now how long you'll take... and your client cannot verify how long it took you to paint. But you do have your own experience that will act as a guideline as to how long a job will take BEFOREHAND. Make up your price according to that. In short give your client a quotation and live up to that.

I'm talking averages:

If you know (from your own experience) a character model takes you roughly 5 hours (average) to finish, charge something reasonable for the amount of time spend on it.
If you take a commission for a monster that you know will take roughly 30 hours of work, charge according to that.
If you know a regiment of 20 troops will take your roughly 25 hours,...

You can still make alterations to the miniatures if you are not happy with how it turned out, but let your own experience count for something when determining your price before your start. Hell, you can actually still lower your price if you had a "fast finish" to bind clients to you. Never ever put your prices higher then your agreed on quotation because you fumbled btw, that's just poor business practice.

This is how I made my prices when I was still doing commision work, and none of my clients ever walked away thinking I was ripping them off in a way. But let's take the OP's commision here as an example (assuming it's 25-40 hours of work) where he charged 95$ (I have no idea if this price was agreed on beforehand or not):

- If he worked on this piece for 25 hours, a quick calculation means that he made roughly 3.8$ per hour doing this commision.
- If he worked for 40 hours, that means he made 2.375$ per hour.

Compared to my first commision piece: A O&G giant that needed to be finished before a deadline (birthday). It was the mother of a young gamer who wanted to give him a well painted miniature and had NO clue how much this would generally cost. So I showed her some of my own stuff, asking about the level of quality she was expecting. We agreed on a mid range quality and i told her that according to my experience that would take me about 20 hours to finish. Given an hourly rate of €6/hour, we agreed on a price of €120 for the giant before I had even opened the box.

It turned out it took me less that (only about 15 hours), so I lowered the agreed on price to €90 in the end. Result: I was happy enough with how much the job netted me, and my client was happy because she got what she agreed on for less then anticipated. The result was that a lot more people from that gaming club contacted me afterwards for commision work.

epic

Nice , the pink flesh looks life like (well for skaven) having the flesh round the stiches pink aswell lends and element of realness to the model.

Well done.