I’m a black animator and illustrator who’d be happy to draw your little blorbos and babygirls or if you want to just donate that’s be fine too anything helps
examples below
I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base I’d accrued.
Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I don’t think more than 10% are active anymore. I’m followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and I’ve been gone so much longer.
This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyone’s feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, it’s hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you can’t even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I can’t direct people to my own site.
So there’s Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I don’t have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I don’t own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.
The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. I’ve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we don’t visit each other in personal spaces anymore. It’s like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.
People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I don’t have any wisdom because I don’t recognize the internet anymore. I don’t feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by things I don’t know how to use. I don’t think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. I’m looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.
I don’t want to make “content,” I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. I’m not sure there’s a place for that anymore.
So @dreriart made a post about commission pricing and I thought since it is doin’ the rounds I’d copy-paste this thing I wrote on DA over to Tumblr because for some reason I … never … did that … before?? So one recurring thing I see a lot in the art community in many different formats is ‘how much should I charge for my commissions?’ What normally follows is a lot of bad advice. Terrible advice. So I’m here to give you some good advice and tell you all about how to value your skillset and price accordingly. This guide has been written with the intended audience of folk who are just starting out with commissions, but I hope it will encourage other artists to give themselves a fair wage and, of course, a lot of this can be transposed over to other creative professions as well. So let’s answer the question of ‘how much should I be charging people for work?’ The answer to this is deceptively simple. Here are the questions you need to ask yourself to form an appropriate response:
For obvious reasons I cannot assist you with these. But once you have these you go to Google and you type in the following: ‘minimum wage per hour in <location name>’ Which is more than likely going to bring up an official government page for your area. Here is the one for the UK since that is where I live.Now what? Well. How old are you? Because some locations have different rates for those in different age brackets. But essentially all you need to do is get the following info: How much is the minimum wage per hour for my age in my area? Now that you have this, how long does a piece take you? You do not need to be exact. A rough guesstimation will do. This will form your base price of: Minimum Wage x Estimated Hours Therefore if I take five hours to paint a portrait and my min wage is £7.83 then my base price for a painted portrait is £39.15.
And please take into considerations the following:
Whenever I say this though, I often get a variety of responses in the negatory for this method. I have answers for each of them. So, let’s run a sort-of-FAQ on this method shall we?
Yes you are. Who says? Your government, for starters. Also me. Here’s the thing. No matter the quality of your art, you deserve a fair living wage for your work. There are lots of people out there with no understanding of the time, effort and tears that go into honing artistic skills. Digital art, making comics, mastering musical composition, sculpting, or whatever it is all takes time to learn and we are constantly growing and improving. And if someone wants to hand you money for what you are producing guess what? You ARE good enough. That is the proof right there. Another human being wants to give you cold hard cash for something that only you can make. If it puts a different perspective on things for you, think of job roles that would be traditionally minimum wage. Probably the one most people will go to is ‘burger flipping at McDonalds’ as an example of a low skill occupation that is stereotypically easy and for those who failed in life etc. etc. (spoiler alert: it isn’t, but that’s a journal entry for another day). Why should this theoretical failure of humanity earn more than you doing a job that ‘anyone can do’? Because art is absolutely more difficult than cleaning out a McFlurry machine (that’s a legit fact by the way: I’ve cleaned one of those and art is way harder). Also, art is a luxury product my friend. No one needs to be buying commissions of their MMO character. They want it? They can play by our rules. And they will.
Your family member/friend/random internet berk is a fucking idiot at best, or intentionally trying to get you to undersell at worst. Firstly, I’d be willing to bet that the person who said this to you is not an artist. If so, what makes them more qualified than another actual artist to tell YOU how to price yourself? Because you trust their opinion? Yeah, but what if their opinion is formed on a factually incorrect assumption of how much art costs/the time it takes to produce because that is a HUGE deal in our community right now. And what if they just want you to stay cheap because it threatens them? Or, as a consumer, want you to stay cheaper for their own selfish purchasing habits? What then? Tell them to fuck off.
Spoiler alert: there will always be someone better than you charging less. There are thousands of mega quality artists out there. I’m considered expensive for what I produce, especially as I live in a country with a currency that translates highly to other currencies. Yet people constantly ask me for commission work. So what gives? Here are some reasons why a prospective client might chose you over someone else:
There are lots of other reasons but price isn’t necessarily often the deciding factor for a lot of clients. Don’t spend your life being concerned with how other people are better than you or you’ll never be happy. I’m nervous about pricing so highly! What if no one wants my art?If a client doesn’t want to pay you a fair living wage for their luxury item purchase then that’s a client you can probably do without to be honest with you.Someone complained about my prices being so high! What do I do? Refer them to this:
Something worth noting is that minimum wage is normally used for people who are employed (not self employed). So people who work contracted 16, 24, 37 or 40+ hours per week for an employer.
Anyone who is not guaranteed work for a set amount of hours per week is absolutely within their right to charge well over the minimum wage, to cover those hours that they are not guaranteed.
Ever wonder why the plumber is so expensive? Or the electrician? The pc repair guy (£60 to transfer my data? Really? All you do is plug it in and leave it for a few hours..)
That’s why. Because most traders/self employed people don’t have work lined up 9-5 mon-fri (though it’s great news if you do!). If my lovely pc repair tech only charged me £20 to transfer my data, or £5 labour (half an hour) + >insert price of laptop screen here< to repair my screen, he’s never going to make enough money to stay open, because he doesn’t have people coming and going in his shop all day every day.
If you’re considering being a part or full time artist, then perhaps consider not just how many hours it takes you per piece, but how much of your time you want to spend on commissions. If you plan on spending 20 hours per week on it (not just the art itself, but consider things like liasing with customers and promoting yourself as well) then calculate the hours with the minimum wage (in the above instance, it would be 20 x £7.83 = £156.60). Then you figure in that week you can hopefully (and realistically) complete let’s say, 3 commissions. That would be £52.20 each. Already that’s more than the base price stated above (which I am not saying is wrong at all). But you’ve covered yourself for the additional work and downtime hours, and given yourself a real expectation that of what income you’ll be earning per week.
This is a TOP QUALITY addition to my post.
