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Hello, I have been looking for a good commission painter who ships to Canada and has fair prices for troops.

There are a lot of Canadian painters. Giving more information on the kind of price point / quality are you looking at will get you better responses.

 keezus wrote:
There are a lot of Canadian painters. Giving more information on the kind of price point / quality are you looking at will get you better responses.

I suppose anything in the range of $100 Canadian or something around there is my budget, before the models. It's intended to be a gift for my mother who is getting into the game with me (we're starting with Shadow War), and wants to play orks, so I figured I'd get her some nicely painted Boyz, that are pleasing to look at.

Quick reality check;

That's pretty low, even for a small squad of 10 boyz, working out at around £5.70 per model.

Don't expect a great paintjob at that price, it'd average at well under an hour per model even for those that charge minimum wage.

By the time you factor in shipping and materials, the actual working budget is lower still.

winterdyne wrote:
Quick reality check;

That's pretty low, even for a small squad of 10 boyz, working out at around £5.70 per model.

Don't expect a great paintjob at that price, it'd average at well under an hour per model even for those that charge minimum wage.

By the time you factor in shipping and materials, the actual working budget is lower still.

Crap. I can see that that is rather low. I was actually basing that number off of a service that I found earlier, but hasn't seemed to be active for a while. Maybe my conversions were off, or I screwed up the math somewhere. As I am rather new to this community, does anyone care to educate me on a realistic price?

For the standard I do, I'd be looking somewhere around £250 to £300, so approximately $500. Edit: I suppose most of what I do is sort of 'store cabinet army' level (I call it high end tabletop).

I *think* I'm about going rate for that level of work; it's certainly a level I can justify doing the work at, and I can't really squeeze it lower for myself. I get enough work to tick over, so it's obviously not too bad, and the clients are happy with the service.

There are cheaper folks out there; especially those that aren't full-time, but sometimes the wait on those can be longer or repeat availability and/or consistency for further jobs can be spotty.

Shop around! Take into account how long the service has been going, the volume of work presented in portfolio, the standard of that work,and what the wait times are.

In addition to your budget, a deadline would be your next most limiting factor. If you need the pieces for next week, a service that has a queue will either rule itself out, or charge you significantly more to push the job through in 'overtime'.

winterdyne wrote:
For the standard I do, I'd be looking somewhere around £250 to £300, so approximately $500. Edit: I suppose most of what I do is sort of 'store cabinet army' level (I call it high end tabletop).

I *think* I'm about going rate for that level of work; it's certainly a level I can justify doing the work at, and I can't really squeeze it lower for myself. I get enough work to tick over, so it's obviously not too bad, and the clients are happy with the service.

There are cheaper folks out there; especially those that aren't full-time, but sometimes the wait on those can be longer or repeat availability and/or consistency for further jobs can be spotty.

Shop around! Take into account how long the service has been going, the volume of work presented in portfolio, the standard of that work,and what the wait times are.

In addition to your budget, a deadline would be your next most limiting factor. If you need the pieces for next week, a service that has a queue will either rule itself out, or charge you significantly more to push the job through in 'overtime'.

Thank you very much. Maybe it's just that I'm new to this, but I thought it would be cheaper. I understand completely why the prices are so high. You have to earn a living somehow. Guess I'll just have to save up. By any chance, have you heard of The Vanus Temple? It seems that he has just disappeared since last year.

Last blog entry of his said he'd started running his local GW.

Pretty much a case in point with the commission work - if you don't charge enough you can't live on it, which means you're not about for long. A quick look at the pricing (multiples of RRP is stupid, btw) and there's no way you can do reasonable work in the time that pays for.

It takes me a good 25 minutes to clean up and assemble a single marine. I'm not gonna do the best part of four hours work for £2 an hour! (£8 for 10 marines).

Think about what you're paying for, and find a service that understands what you're paying for and you'll get a better result out of it.

Feel free to ask "what's the plan for the paintwork, how many man-hours work are you estimating" and expect a sensible answer. If it's a quick airbrush and edge job, nothing too fancy, then a lower quote makes more sense. If they're promising top end work for only half an hour's time, then there's something pretty wrong.

It's pretty sensible stuff to think about, but you'd be surprised how many people (both customers and the less experienced commission services) don't consider it properly.

Looking back, the pricing did seem too good to be true. Thank you once again for the help and advice, it really helps.

You could always paint them for her yourself? I found reading a couple articles and watching a few videos on painting warhammer (and buying good brushes) escalated my painting level drastically. Once you know what you're doing it's not that hard to make a decent looking model imo, but I can see how for some people it might not be their forte.

There's also something to be said for the personal element doing them for her yourself puts in.