How to price your commissions

captainharrie:

1. Set a monthly target.

How much do you want to earn in a month? Lets say you want to earn £400. Base this on your bills and living expenses, things you’re saving up for, etc.

That means each week you want to earn roughly £100.

(monthly target) / (four weeks) = [Weekly Target]
£400 / 4 = £100

2. Determine how much time you are going to devote to commissions per week

For this example, lets go with 20 hours!

Also you’ll want to figure out how many hours per day that is so you don’t overwork yourself. There are 5 working days in a week, so thats four hours per day.

You don’t have to follow this exactly, but it’s good to know so you know when to stop and call it a day.

I suggest between 18-30 hours a week, and no more than 40.

(hours per week) / (5 days) = [Daily Hours]
20hrs / 5 = 4hrs

3. Calculate your hourly rate

To earn £100 in 20 hours, you need to earn £5 an hour. 

(weekly rate) / (number of hours) = [Hourly Rate]
£100 / 20hrs = £5

4. Calculate how long you spend working on a piece.

this includes time spent researching, anything like getting used to a character’s design to finding references is labour that the commissioner is paying for, not just the final piece!

If you’re a digital artist, you can use Cash Clock to help with this!

it will track how long you are focused on windows you choose, and stop counting if you’re idle for a set amount of time. It’ll also do the next step for you.
[http://www.online-stopwatch.com/download-stopwatch/]

for this example lets say you spent roughly two hours researching, doing practice sketches, etc., and then 6 hours on the final piece.

5. Calculate your price quote

(hourly rate) x (time spent) = [price per commission]

(monthly target) / (price per commission) = [number of commissions]

for our example this is £5 x 8 hours = £40 per commission.
to reach the goal of £400 a month thats 10 commissions a month.

Do this for each type of commission you offer! Lets say a sketch takes you 2 hours of research + 3 hours of drawing. That’s £25 a piece (16 sketches)

Tips:

– when you finish timing yourself working, add on an extra hour so you have some buffer time to polish and fix things.
You’re likely to be spending longer on your paid work, so account for that!

– You ever notice how your first few doodles aren’t as good as what you draw after you’ve scrapped a few?

Keep that momentum, when you’ve finished sketching a piece, even if it’s not a sketch commission stop and continue on to sketch a different commission.

When you’ve finished sketching, do this again with the next stage in your process like flats or inking.

This is a more cost effective way of working – working in batches like this is commonly used in comics to maintain consistency between pages!

– don’t be afraid to ask for tips! 

Include a link to https://ko-fi.com/ or https://paypal.me on your commissions page. Some people might not be able to commission you, but they might still have some money to spare!