Painting for a Living – Part Two

Come here for Part One

This has been rather a long time coming, writing wise. I think mostly because I was trying to do too much with too little. I wanted to write advice for potential fellow travellers on this wonderful road of painting. But truth be told. My business didn't really work (I am back "in business" but only for raising investment for other schemes and a bit of pocket money, it can't support me). I am not really qualified to advise anyone! Instead I thought I would offer my thoughts on one of the reasons PVP never really got off the ground as a full time venture and something that others need to consider. Pricing.

Editor's Note: This article might seem like a whine, it isn't, I've loved my work. Consider it more of a cautionary tale than a complaint. Read to the end and you'll see what I mean. Also, others will have had different experiences. I'd urge them to share them. It's a cool job, be nice to find the formula that works :)

Pricing for painting services is really One Of Those Things. You are trying to sit in the sweet spot of a curve between what people are prepared to pay and what you are worth. I'm afraid to say, with few exceptions, it will have to trend toward the prepared end. There is a good reason for this. The market is kinda split into two halves. The premium end where Golden Demon winners and the like live and the budget end where the basecoat-drybrush-wash brigade dwell. I was trying to operate in a medium ground between these halves. Better quality than the budget but cheaper than the premium. The problem comes when you start doing armies and the costs mount up. Even the boldest customer will baulk when you say you want £400 for 20 models and I suspect, rightly so. Lets consider a case study:

Why Badrukk? Well, one, I love how this model turned out. Two, he's a good example of the character work I do. Three, he was done on a mates-rates basis for a friend so I can talk conceptually about the pricing without making anyone feel uncomfortable (definately not my intention). I used to have characters as £30 a model. That was three times the cost of the model in the first place. It seems like a lot. It's actually nothing at all. Let's work through it. This model took the best part of two days to paint. Lets say 12 man hours. That might be under-selling it but it'll work for the purposes of this exercise. Now lets consider an appropriate hourly wage. Well, lets set aside the concept that it has taken 25 years for me to get to this level of painting. Most jobs with 25 years experience are paying a hell of a lot more than painting (consider a music teacher, something I see as comparable in terms of the creative-with-a-lot-of-time-becoming-expert stakes and check out how much they charge an hour). Instead, let's just take the living wage which in the UK is £7.85 an hour giving you about £15,400 a year. Hardly mega-bucks but better than minimum wage. Feels right. Now multiply that £7.85 by 12.

I'll help you out Mulder: It's £94.20.

£94.20

That's nuts. I wouldn't pay it. Not for one model. Never mind that it would probably round to an even hundred once postage and materials (the cheap bit of this weirdly) are included. It can get even worse when you do a unit:

That unit took me the best part of four days to finish. They're a pain to do, even the shields alone took a huge amount of time. Four days, that's £251.20 for a unit of 30. £8 per model. Now that seems more fair but when you add it up and it becomes £250 odd... well, that makes people baulk a little. By contrast I can do 50 Night Goblins in about a day and a half. More like £1.88 a goblin and the same £94.20 as Badrukk alone cost. It makes it impossible to offer a consistent part rate so you have to negotiate every commission individually which can make people suspicious that you are trying to rip them off. Worse, sometimes what should have been easy - those Longbeards above - can suddenly turn out to be a horrorshow of ultra detail and finicky brushwork. You quoted the client a price that would pay you for a days work and it took you four. You just quartered your income. 

Don't forget that you are competing for these commissions, almost exclusively online. Out there there is the budget end. People offering flat rates of £4-5 per model (what I started with in order to compete). That is what you are competing with. There's no way you can earn any fair pay painting to a high - but not super-high, Golden Demon prestige-bringing designer-label-pricing-justification  - standard for £5 a model. So you end up in a weird hinterland where you end up with a few customer who like you because of the results they get and a lot of drive by clients that you can't bring in because of pricing. For interest, this blog tracks unique visitors as well as crude page-views. In the time PVP has been open I have received getting on for 35,000 unique visitors (and I love you all) generating an eye-watering 275,000 hits. From this I have generated just three clients who I didn't know before. Granted, they are enthusiastic clients. But I am not overflowing with work. 

So what to do? Honestly my advice would be pick one end of the market and target it. If you have serious Golden Demon/Crystal Brush/Euro Militaire winning cojones then go straight for the Premium end. Estimate carefully with wriggle room for time and just straight up charge what you are worth. If you don't, my advice is to do what I could not. Swallow the pride and pitch for the budget end. If I found spraying a basecoat, doing one drybrushed highlight and a wash satisfying then I could easily make a comfortable part time living. I don't. I can't. That's why PVP doesn't really work. But you could! The only thing I would charge and abdure you with is the following:

Do not, DO NOT bait and switch. I see it all the time. The painting service page is all beautifully painted examples of their premium level work (of course, you want the page to look nice) with just one picture of a unit painted in the basic scheme (and frankly a little more work) on the payments page. I have seen examples of work from some of these services and am really not impressed. I could teach people how to paint to that standard in one hour. Did so, for years (ex-GW staffer). Don't do that. Be up front. Be honest, you are trading people time. You are for the people who can't be bothered to paint and aren't fussed about the quality too much. Don't make people think they're getting one thing and deliver another.

There. Lecture over. No more didactic commands from me ;)

I'll leave you with a few final thoughts, some cross pollinate with blogging:

• If you are considering painting for a living, consider whether you can afford it. It will be a year or more before clients really notice you. Even when they do you'll be only earning part time salery. Don't do it if you're looking to support family and home on this alone.
• The first year is networking. Go everywhere. Register for every blogroll, find every directory, drive eyeballs to your site. Offer tutorials, offer advice with a link back to something useful (DON'T spam just the link). Site traffic does come. It just starts slow until eventually something goes what I call "Wargamer viral" as one of the big sites links to you. From this traffic comes your customers.
• Have your own hobby. It'll generate interesting content for the page but...
• Do not waste money on things you are not interested in just to show you paint them. I did Flames of War models, Warmachine models, all sorts. Number of commissions generated? Zero.
• Do not try to predict what the internet will like. I have failed hopelessly. Projects that I thought were winners didn't register, some things I thought were routine went through the roof. Throw everything against the wall without ego or expectation and see what sticks.

 When you do get clients:

• CONFIRM what they want, how they want it on which models. Take photos of the models as they arrive, tag 'em with numbers and confirm with the client which models need what job. It sounds daft but there is a lot of misunderstanding possible with email. There is nothing more embarrassing for a "pro-painter" than to spend days working on something only to mix up which were supposed to be blue and which brown (real world example).
• Consider taking daily progress shots and either sending them to the client or posting them on facebook or whathaveyou. It makes the clients feel involved with the process, generates excitement, content and keeps you aware of your rate of progress.
• Make suggestions. The client is hiring a professional, if you think the colour scheme will clash, mention it and offer an alternative. Make it clear that it is entirely their choice but they may not have realised that there was a more attractive option.
• Don't do volume discounts, it's tempting because people are used to buying things that way but your costs are your time, you can't make them lower by clever bulk ordering.
• Enjoy it. This isn't 9-5 in an office.

That having been said:

• Do not paint from dawn to midnight. You WILL get an RSI. I did. 

Who knows, maybe this will help someone. Otherwise it'll give you a view in to what it is to run one of these things. I'll say again, my business didn't work, there are reasons for it! If you can avoid them then you might well do better. In the mean time

Happy Painting and

TTFN

Open Channel 'D'

As long term readers will know, I don't just do miniature painting. More and more I am building physical props and costume. Every now and again I make something cool enough to share here, today is one of those days. Let me take you to a place and time where you could battle THRUSH without sniggering, where a Russian's accent is optional, it's time to find out what Archer is referencing so much. Welcome to the world of the Man From UNCLE...

Or more specifically one particular prop from the show:

Yep, it's time to whip out a seemingly innocuous pen and convert it into, well, a Spy-Fi cell phone really but this was 1964, with the immortal words "Open Channel D". Has the ugliest ringtone in human creation but is otherwise very cool. I've got a dear friend who was going to a 60's themed LARP in the guise of one of the shows stars, David McCallum's Illya Kuryakin, and wanted a communicator pen to round off the costume. I obliged:

This was a prototype for me so there was a lot of fiddling to get the design practical for home construction. The process started from getting some shots of the original pen from the series:

pics on left result of google search, on right, the sketch I did for the client

As you can see from the picture above (the sketch I sent the client to explain my thinking is on the right), I was trying to figure out whether it would be preferable to have a more authentic remove and reverse microphone end or to just pull off a cap and palm it. The second option would have been much, much easier (just cut and bodge a pen) but we both agreed as much authenticity as possible was better. After a little while longer I realised that no modern pen under £50 was constructed in the way required to pull off the project. I'd need to scratch build out of metal tubing.

Two sizes of steel tubing (12 and 10 mm) from B&Q later and I had the body of it. Steel is a bit of a bear to work with but at 1mm thickness you can cut it with a regular pipe cutter and file away the indented sections. The 10mm tube was selected to telescope within the 12 so a short section of the 10 with a little collar of 12 made for the reversible microphone end. Irregularities in the pipe had the bonus of allowing the sections to lock and unlock by twisting.

More steel tubing - this time 2 and 3mm tubing from Albion Alloys was used for the antenna end. Much easier to work with the Albion stuff, no irregularities, proper quality control. Lovely. The pierced metalwork tube of the microphone caused me a problem but foils from an electric shaver provided an acceptable option. They're not perfect though so I'm continuing to search for a better option. The "pen" end is non functional, it's just a steel cone.

Some finagling with bits off've real pens provided the last of the furniture and there you have it. Perfectly ordinary pen by day, spy-fi cell phone by night. As with all prototypes there are thing's I'd change if doing it again (if I can find a source for pierced metal tubing of the right size - 8mm diameter I'd like to make some more). The microphone needs to change, problems attaching the pen clip mean I'd sandwich it between two layers of the 12mm steel, a few other tweaks... but that's the curse of the perfectionist/obsessive - delete as appropriate. Mercifully there was a deadline so I could just say: "it HAS to be done. It is done."

Hope you've enjoyed this little foray into my other work. More if I get it :)

TTFN

Dwarf-Hating Gobbos

Hi folks! This weekends hobby has yielded two lean, green, stunty-hating machines:

Yup, the last two characters of my night goblin army are done. Just squigs and artillery now stand between me and 2500 points of black cowled nutters. Nice! Respectively these two are one of the few remaining GW big bosses and an Avatars of War model called Skrig Dwarfmocker. A name so brilliant I am nicking it wholesale. Skrig is a wannabe boss, a buffoon who nonetheless sees himself as important and apes the Dwarfs that all Night Goblins hate in an effort to become as hard as they are. Sadly, Gobbos do not make disciplined shieldbearers and so Skrig's life is a series of embarrassing falls, recriminations and mild head trauma. Still, at least there's always a big shield handy when the going gets pointy. By contrast his colleague Bodgit Bonebreaker is that most dangerous of creatures: a quiet, clever, insanely violent goblin. He claims to have fought with Skarsnik below Karak Eight Peaks and from the collection of Dwarf scalps, skulls and beards he displays he might be right. Or he could have tripped over a picnicking Dwarf family and slaughtered them for trophies, who can tell? Regardless, of all the underlings in the horde, Rhagat has his eye on Bodgit as the most likely to challenge for leadership. Bodgit's taciturn countenance though is giving nothing of his plans away. Rhagat will have to sleep with one eye open...

We'll Start the painting talk with Bodgit as he is just splendid. One of my favourite goblin models, there's just such an air of menace about him with the tiny comedy touch of the pointy helmet poking through the tented hood to make him "goblin". The trophy rack also helps him stand out from the herd of ordinary gobbos. Painting started with the usual block-in-each-bit-of-cloth-a-different-dark-colour method, in this case Val German Camo Black-Brown and German Grey. Regular readers will not in any way be surprised by those choices, they're my go-to for black. :) Frankly, the method proceeds exactly the same as for the normal gobbos from the link. I just add extra highlight layers. The wolf pelt on his shoulders was Stormvermin Fur washed black and drybrushed with Longbeard Grey. Makes a nice natural mid-grey wolf tone. The skull with hair gave me pause for a little while, skulls don't keep their hair y'know. But after a while I realised I could paint the upper part of the skull as decomposing skin, as though from a badly preserved shrunken head. Eventually the scalp will part company with the skull and so will the hair, for now. Still Timotai Zombie. For reference, the bearded skull is just a severed beard stuffed into the skull to keep it on the pole so works perfectly.

Loved painting him. Worked a treat. Then...

I really, really wanted to love this model, I really did, the character of the piece is wonderful. I think it's great when alternative providers rock up and hate having to tear into them when they get it wrong. I'll be as gentle as I can. When you go to Avatars of War's shop they are still showing the green sculpt, not a finished, painted model. I now know why. You don't get the green from the cast. I don't know if it is a sculpting, cutting, moulding or casting failure but somewhere along the line it went wrong. The shield is not a nice dwarf ancestor head but an almost smooth thing that looks more like an Averland sunburst than a Dwarf device. The "knotwork" border isn't knotwork, the lines never cross but just waggle up and down one on top of the other. Oh, and change thickness around the border. The head is cut from the body to leave no neck, you need to sculpt one in. The arms attach badly, the fabric looks like lumps of green-stuff not cloth (from the only angle they don't show you on the store)... yeah. I'm stopping there. Functionally, there is nothing too wrong with the model. It oozes character and is a great concept. I just wish that AoW had taken the extra care to make it's quality match it's concept. I was disappointed to say the least.

All that being said, I did my best with the painting to minimise the problems with the shield. Ended up painting it Stormbourne colours with lots of rusty paint on top to give it some age, couldn't do too much chipping as that would draw attention to the design rather than diminish it. The rest of him was Standard Goblin with the addition of the shiny shiny crown slipping over his eye to draw the eye to the actually quite nice face. The torn, raggedy suit of chainmail under his robes is a nice touch too. He's going to make a cracking buffoonish boss but doesn't have the quality to be an army general. Never mind.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm now getting scarily close to completing phase 2 of the project. I've got all but seven squigs and hoppers sourced for the big unit of Deep Road Toads (mixing hoppers with regular squigs because awesome and variety). I've got three Roman Scorpion bolt throwers from Warlord Games that are going to get a mild goblin-ing and some converted crew and am in the process of scratch building the rock lobbers. I'm going to have one operated by the Skull Pass troll like the old Warmaster one but with the extra detail that 28mm scale can bring over 10mm. After that, probably a few more Dwarfs to finish off the Stormbournes:

Then I'm free and clear for the Rivver Pikeys and Averland Empire. Feels weird coming to the end of such vast projects. The Dwarfs are close on 5k, the Night and Spider gobbos together are 3.5k. These are not tiny projects! But that's all for today.

TTFN

More men in blue and a Tank Commissar

Hi folks, last time we were showing off a couple of Death Korps in their WW1 French/Belgian-inspired scheme (blue grey). Today we have better photos and another pair have joined them!

Eagle-eyed readers will have noted the deliberate mistake from last time. The green sash that has been a unifying spot colour across a lot of the guard I've painted for this client were absent. Oops. Meant to do that obviously. Fixed now. The remaining two DKK are minor conversions of the command packs from Forgeworld and more evidence for me that DKK really are the way to go for Imperial Guard if the wallet will bear it. The faceless thing means that twinned bodies impact far less than in other armies. Just swap out the arms and you have a new feel of model.

Truth be told, there isn't a lot to say about these that wasn't covered in the previous post. One thing I forgot to say last time though was about the choice of the grey areas. I could have used two separate greys - German Grey would have been a great choice for the darker areas - but by using the same grey and just darkening and lightening it for the two areas you get two apparent colours without having two different hues. This doesn't matter much but it helps if you are going to introduce a strong fourth spot colour like the green. Technically the eye sees the four different colours and should be starting to twitch (three is pretty much the limit before you have to be careful about clashes and garish-ness, totally a word). Instead, the eye sees two shades of the same hue and two other colours. Much happier. This is a finicky thing but an example of the kind of oft unconscious thought processes that go into making colour choices when you have a decent grasp of colour theory.

In a similar vein, this tank commissar was driving me nuts. The gas masked face was simply not working in the same rubberised fabric as the others. It just disappeared into the other black tones (note the Val German Grey uniform and German Camo Black-Brown leather trenchcoat). Frustrated, I ignored it while I worked through the other areas of the model. Finally it was finished and I had to face facts that the face wasn't working. The whole thing was just a null area. Then I remembered seeing a photo of WW1 German storm-troopers who had painted stylised skulls on to their respirators. The mask was kinda skull shaped anyway so I went with it. Really helped. Finally he had a crude face and a point of interest in the model. Plus, y'know, an actual death's head will help his terror-cred no end, right?

That's all for today folks

TTFN

More Death Korps, and this time, they're blue

Hi folks, another quick update today (the commission I'm working through is several small groups of Imperial Guard officers). This time it is once again Death Korps of Krieg (becoming something of a specialist, them and Legio Astorum titans) only this time, rather than their normal drab khaki, they're a rather fetching blue:

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love the Death Korps models, they're an example of Grimdark done right. They're whole vibe is so hopeless and faceless and yet simultaneously the models are characterful and most importantly the overall impression is of a professional, regular army. So many IG regiments looked like irregulars or ridiculous peacocks. These and the steel legion that undoubtedly inspired them are soldiers. Not ultra-gothic walking cathedrals, not wild; fanatical desperadoes. No. Just an army. Heck, they've even got backpacks. Love 'em. Were I ever to do another guard army it would be DKK. Although probably a mechanised one as doing a whole infantry horde at those prices? Shudder. Anyway, enough of that, painting:

First up is the lovely radio operator. Colours were taken from a photo of the client's existing army (always tricky to match exactly, so they're kinda "Jeff-matched" colours). The main coat colour is The Fang (blue-grey, #stupidpaintnames), shaded with Drakenhof Nightshade to give it a more blue tone and then rehighlighted first with The Fang then with a couple of mixes of The Fang and Russ Grey. The lining and the trousers both start with Mechanicus Standard Grey. The trousers get a bit of black mixed in to darken it. The coat lining gets highlighted with Dawnstone and the trousers just come back to Mechanicus Standard Grey. The armour is the same as the trousers. All that's left really is the rubber mask (Ammo Rubber and Tires) and the leather (Val Leather Brown shaded with Agrax Earthshade and rehighlighted) and he is done. On to the officer.

This pose is absolutely awesome. The flying - gorgeously sculpted coat - the purposeful stride, the drawing sword, the totally absent face... wait what? Yeeeeah, I don't know if this is a) a miscast, b) difficult to sculpt/cast face in the tiny area available, c) uh, dunno, but there really is not any features under that cap brim. I tried faking it but in the end just minimised it with dark skin and a suggestion of eyes. Ignore the face, ignore it. Another time I might have tried sculpting in the top half of the gas mask to obliterate it. I'd recommend you all do so. But anyway, otherwise lovely model, same paint treatment as the rest of it with the pseudo NMM braid and done.

Hope you enjoyed this whistle stop tour of DKK, more coming soon.

TTFN

Highland Bling

(Don't hate me for the title, it just happened...)

Hi folks, a fun one today, these three have been a blast:

must stop painting hard to photograph brown tones...

These are a the latest commission and are a mix of the new plastic Scions and Victoria miniatures kilt legs and pith helmeted heads. The combination works really nicely I think, something about the anachronistic helmets and the ornate armour is fairly "40k-bonkers". I had completely free reign on the colours for this one so had to think through the feel and balance of the models. The kilts were going to be tartan, the helmets "pith canvas" so there were already colours there, the armour would have to either complement all the colours in the tartan or be a more neutral tone. In the end, I figured that painting the gothic armour in bare steel would be neat. In fact, the whole thing cried out for Victorians in Spaaaaace vibe. So I went with it.

love the stowage on these guys

The rest of the uniform was a either Val English Uniform and Val Khaki. Because everything else was so uniform on them I felt they deserved some individuality, so each got their own tartan on their kilts. I'd like to give some form of full tutorial on the tartan but it really is a matter of fiddling back and forth until you get the result you want. Tartan is created through intermixing coloured threads during weaving so can look very complex, we just use paint so the thought process is different to the weaving and it's one I am still getting to grips with. I feel I can, however give you the basic theory behind getting tartan looking right:

Start with a solid base colour of the background, shade the background in any creases as you won't want to later. Make a mixture of the background and whatever colours you want the squares to be until it looks like it's a 50:50 mix. It won't be, it'll be more like 3:2 or even 2:1 depending on the strength of pigments. Paint these in a broad grid over the tartan, trying to keep the spaces even, you want the gap between the lines the same width as the lines themselves. Then paint the pure colour you wanted into the squares formed where the lines cross.This gets you the basic shape of the tartan.

Now you need the stripe colours, these can be all sorts of colours but here I'm using black. Very, very thin lines (thinned paint and a decent point on the brush here) and paint through an area of the pattern, chose either in the stripes or crossing them. Both will look messy. Real tartans often have multiple lines but we're dealing with 28mm men here. It'll look fine by this stage but you may want to kick it up one more notch and darken the edges of the stripes where they meet the background. Helps the finished look.

Animated .gif! PVP, now with awesome mid-nineties technology...

Look through the tartan patterns on line to get inspiration. Though bear in mind that some patterns that look cracking on people will look utterly horrible on a miniature. Use good plaid judgement folks.

With that, I am off. Happy painting folks

TTFN

What I did on my holidays

Hi folks, as I intimated in the last post I was away all last week. Well, as is usual for me it was something of a busman's holiday and took the opportunity to finish once and for all the core of the Goblin army. As a result the pirates progress counter jumped by a cool seventy models and we have stuff like this to show for it:

First up are the Bonechewer Boys, one half of what was formerly planned as the third horde of fifty. Frankly, three 50 strong units was a bit unwieldy so I broke the last into two to act as gobbo detachments. They've still got nets, expensive in a unit this small but damn do they save their bacon against halbardiers, and only really suffer in the longevity stakes. Well worth making the change. I had decided that the smaller units would be unpopular goblins who the hordes wouldn't tolerate. The Bonechewers are a unit of cannibals. All gobbos will eat their own in times of hunger but the Bonechewers are... a bit fond of the taste. Units camping near them tend to post guards and sleep with one eye open. But even the Bonechewers are popular compared to the next lot:

This small ragged lot are the Disciples of Joodee. Now follows a brief recap on the subject of Joodee: Joodee was an unremarkable, unreliable 2nd level shaman in the Bitter Moons, until one fateful night when a ritual (an RPG scenario) went wrong and a miscast at exactly the wrong moment left Joodee possessed with a demon. Yup. Demons wearing goblin skin. The other lads didn't mind Demon Joodee as the burning eyes made it easier to find him in the dark and despite the spooky voice he had good and funny ideas. Unfortunately, Rhagat was in need of more Archnaroks (they tend to die a lot) and so got Pappow his Shaman Lord to burn the demon within Joodee to force grow more from their eggs. Joodee went back to being a normal shaman. But some of the lads really missed him. They have formed a quasi religious cult around restoring Joodee's "true nature". The champion dresses like him (yeah it's a quick conversion) and their shields and banners bear the burning eyed gobbo. Their standard even bears a replica of the puppet that Joodee believes is the real caster of his spells. Suffice to say: A bit odd. Just another one of those cool things that can develop over a long narrative campaign. Oh, and the banner is a skaven clanrat one to keep variety across the army.

Now to be fair, the spiders were a bit of a cheat. I'd all but painted this regiment and had started the other last year before all motivation left me. They are a complete sod to paint in this semi-realistic stripy scheme (I counted, eighty stripes per spider, 800 in the unit o.O). So these sort of belong half in this year and half in the last.

The second of the units was the box set spiders rather than skull pass so a bit more variety in spiders and weaponry/command. I can't tell you how glad I am to finish these. They were ruinously hard to stay motivated through. But the end result is so, so worth it. Not to mention that I now have a full thousand points of nothing but spiders and spider related units - The Blackhead Tribe. This arachnophobiac's nightmare gave Charlie's Empire a near-run kicking at the weekend to blood them and though they are a bit glass hammer in action they work nicely. With all of this work all that is left of the Bitter Moon army to paint is fun stuff like rock lobbers, squigs and characters. Hurrah!

Oh, yeah and a whole other goblin army but that's just because I'm a glutton for punishment. Well, I'm back to work this week so more shinies soon :)

TTFN