wallacepolsom
tannertan36
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Three Goblin Art
PR's Tumblrdome
Keni
One Nice Bug Per Day
todays bird
Mike Driver
No title available
d e v o n
Monterey Bay Aquarium
almost home
Janaina Medeiros
Today's Document
Cosimo Galluzzi
Claire Keane
roma★
ellievsbear
if i look back, i am lost
seen from United States
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@ghostsmultiply
Billy Bones. Still working on this but I’m having fun with what I’ve done so far.
Just a reminder that I post a handful of wips and doodles on my instagram that you wont find anywhere else!
https://www.instagram.com/encryptedritual/
I also have the progress file of this if anyone has open canvas and would like to see. :)
reblogging here for those of you not on my art blog. :3 I like this one a bunch.
My 2 cents on… cheap commissions…!
Absolutely good advice from a lovely professional artist! While cheap commissions might seem worth the work, they negatively impact the freelance market so please price considerably!
I don’t believe commissions should be over $30. That’s just damn greedy. It’s digital art. DIGITAL. Not a physical thing you can touch. If it was physical it’d be understandable. And it’s not hard physical labor. It also doesn’t take that long to draw unless you lollygag. I mean, I know, I draw A LOT. It takes 2-7 hours max if you know what you’re doing. So, I agree with people selling it cheap for DIGITAL not PHYSICAL art. Anything beyond the $30 limit is ridiculous and I’d be surprised if people actually bought the art and you make a living off of it. The vast majority aren’t silly enough to spend their hard earned money on something that you can’t touch and something you probably won’t look at everyday unless it’s a profile picture. I apologize for being rude but it’s infuriating. But it is your art. Price it for how much you want, I don’t care. But don’t expect other people to price their art higher so you don’t have to compete and you can make some cash as well.
Yeah, fuck that person above Phae, for real. Change to online and fandom related commission pricing is happening, but it’s going slow. The OP is right, everyone needs to be on the same page with pricing, but when you have literal thousands of young artists who don’t know any better, it’s hard to get everyone on board.
While I don’t do commissions, or art really, I’d follow this pattern too. You should get paid for the time you worked on it. Yes custom art is going to be ‘expensive’ just because you’re not printing it out or getting it printed on a canvas and shipped to you doesn’t mean it’s not worth the cost.
@the guy above talking about $30 for 2-7 hours of work:
Where I like minimum wage is around $8.25. That means for whatever you’re doing, you get paid at least that much per hour. Being paid $8.25/hr to make art seems ridiculously low to me. It’s skilled labor. This person you’re paying spent years honing their skill. If a piece takes 7 hours and you ask $30 for it, you’re paying yourself less than $4.30 per hour.
And that’s not even taking into account the materials cost and overhead. Sure, in this instance we’re talking about digital art rather than traditional so you don’t have things like paint and canvas and brushes, but you do have the need for a computer that can handle a graphics-heavy workload. Not to mention a graphic tablet, desk, chair, and the housing for such items.
I make jewelry on commission and pret-a-porter. I play myself $25 an hour for that HIGHLY SKILLED labor. Are there people more skilled than me? Absolutely. But I still value my time. AND take into account my overhead and materials. If I were making something that took 7 hours to complete, I wouldn’t charge less than $200 for it, depending on the materials.
It gets kind of accounting-y from here on, but in order to sustain a business (and that’s what artists who offer commissions ARE, business owners providing a service) the owner needs to factor these ‘hidden’ costs into their pricing. It’s called amortization. Literally every business with an accounting department or even just something like Quicken or Intuit does it.
Probably more than a quarter of the ticket price of your 20 oz. Pepsi doesn’t even cover the drink itself, but more likely:
the cost of building a factory
buying or leasing land for that factory to go on
taxes on operating a factory
equipment to go in that factory to make the soda
energy to power the equipment
people to work in the factory
the cost of making a bottle (and cap) to hold the soda
transportation of the bottled soda from the factory to the store
the cost of operating THAT store (land, taxes, energy, cost to stock the shelves, employees’ pay)
And finally, whatever profit they can tack on each bottle.
Now, with Pepsi, we’re talking about a public corporation with investors. For a single artist selling their work (digital or otherwise), those costs are much smaller. But most don’t make as many sales so the portion of the price which is taken up by their amortized overhead is larger.
So no, paying $30 for something that takes 7 hours to complete isn’t just devaluing the creator’s time, it’s downright stupid. There’s no way to sustain that business by doing so.
Come on, you wouldn’t have a plumber come over and spend 4 hours working on your sink or whatever and hand him a twenty. It’s skilled labor they’re providing. They’re giving up THEIR time to help YOU. And they expect to be compensated for that time and whatever parts they needed to fix YOUR problem.
A profession artist (one who is paid for their work as opposed to a hobbyist who is not) is no different from a plumber. They are someone with a skill you do not possess who you are paying to perform that skill. Their overhead could be pipes or computer software, it doesn’t matter. They still have costs they need to cover, just like any other businessperson.
a lil comic I made a while back to illustrate this point:
As an artist, i hear this almost every day.
Now, I usually ignore whoever says it, but when I do respond, I put things in perspective for that person in this way:
1.) Art is a Luxury Good.
Art isn’t a need like groceries. Art is more like spending a big chunk of your last paycheck on a fancy dinner. (They do call it the culinary arts for a reason).
We’ll use a “fancy dinner” as our good, and pretend that you’re the small fancy restaurant to explain everything here.
2.) Pricing is determined by Supply and Demand.
If you’re not familiar with the basics of economics, the law of supply and demand is the concept that pricing for a good is determined by how much of it is available and how badly people want it. The higher the price, the less people want it, and vice versa.
However, there’s a sweet-spot where the amount of “fancy dinners” your restaurant is able to produce is exactly equal to the number of customers who are able to afford - or willing to pay - for that dinner.
3.) More customers =/= more income
Based on #2, this kind of pricing means that yes, there are several people who cannot afford to eat here, and therefore choose to eat elsewhere.
You’re losing customers! Isn’t that bad? Well, no. As a small restaurant, you can only make so many dinners and seat so many people at a time. As long as your tables are full, it doesn’t really matter if some people check the prices on the menu and go somewhere less expensive.
4.) You… shouldn’t lower your prices?!
If you see an artist that does commissions or sales for a living (or any small sole proprietorship, really) and you see them posting work with any frequency, it’s probably safe to assume that, whatever their prices are, people are buying.
Telling an artist who is enjoying success at the price point that they’ve set that they should lower their prices only does two things:
Makes the artist feel bad & tells them you don’t value their work
Makes it clear to the artist that you’re a customer outside their price range & that they shouldn’t work with you if they value themselves.
The bottom line:
You CAN lower your prices, and you COULD, but why would you? Your little restaurant is full of happy customers that gladly (and generously) gave some of their hard earned money to enjoy your talents, efforts, and services.
The guy at the hostess stand, flipping his shit at the girl who would normally be seating them about how the restaurant prices are “too damn high” should simply be asked to leave, (or better yet, ignored) and your restaurant will continue to enjoy a successful run of satisfied customers.
Should you ever lower your prices? Well yeah, if you’re not selling anything or nobody’s buying what your’e putting out there, that means that the prices are too high for whatever it is you’re selling. If you’ve got a steady string of customers (not one or two repeat high rollers) then you have no reason to alter your pricing, and if you have more customers than you have seats (or commission slots available) you should actually consider raising your prices.
Happy selling, and please remember to be polite when explaining this to people! Some people just REALLY don’t get it… you’re always welcome to link them to this if you don’t want to explain it yourself.”
…so yup! That about sums it up for me.
I really wish that this was common knowledge among all artists. :[
Updated the encrypted ritual website with a few new images (including this one of Miles). Yay!
Imma just reblog this here too. I was going to post a picture of Billy but Miles won out because I just want to give him chin scritches.
I’ve been going through old files and these are two of Joey’s characters/imaginary friends that he had drawn probably about 5-6 years ago? I want to make plush things of these for him some day.
There are probably half a dozen languages I want to learn so that I can actually record internal conversations. I have so many things in my bucket list.
my home is not in this skin not in these aching muscles and bone it's in your every breath that moves me gives life to this otherwise empty shell
Spoiler alert : Everyone is canon with Casper.
Kay and Casper.
Healthiest relationship ever.
Casper shaved off all his hair almost a year ago. He’s been keeping it on the shorter-ish side for a while now.
affffffjfjfjfjfjf.
Also, pretty sure at this point you can pick apart a bunch of our art as follows >
Casper generally influences anything that has really fine pencil details, especially if it has darker themes to it.
Billy does mostly self portraits and facial close-ups and some stuff that comes off as more anime-ish.
Brett draws very loose drawings of monsters, girls, and random still life and portraits. He usually layers drawings until they are refined to his liking.
Conway mostly draws either cute anime or really dark scribbly stuff.
Ashleigh draws furries and lots of porn.
There are a few others but those are the main people that contribute to drawing stuff.
I think I first wrote about Billy in 2003. He was homeless at the time and hadn’t eaten in days. Collin found him while he was doing a super shitty job robbing someone and ended up taking him home and later adopting him. I think he was 12 at the time.
If Collin hadn’t come around, I don’t think that Billy would’ve made it this far.
More Billy. This one is from Wednesday night.
I think I should just expect Billy to show up when I connect to the god phone at this point. It’s been pretty consistent.
You can look at this one straight on or rotate it 90 degrees.
little bunny
@illestphee @agentskyhouse
Reblogging these here because I love that hat so much.
Drawing only in ink really does change one’s style. O.o
I actually have a tendency to switch up every few months and ban myself, to an extent, from using pencils because I feel like it keeps me thinking more in my head vs. on the page? Like, I have to be much more careful about placement and I learn how to fix my mistakes without the ability to erase them and such.
It’s fun.
Billy.
I scanned like 60 loose pages of art from the past month or two...so these are just the beginning of updates.
Billy has been having a stressful few weeks so he has been popping up a handful.
Also, for the record...Billy sketched these.
Changing subject. Here is a drooly cyborg I doodled two days ago.
I’ve been doodling derp things between working on this last commission because it’s porn and people keep trying to look over my shoulder even though I’m in a corner.
I wore hot pink mascara last night and I was too lazy to shower night so I may or may not have a pink and glittery face as I assist with these dog classes.
