Hi~ I got a commission request from someone asking if I do comic pages, but I 'm not sure what I should charge for something like that. So here are some examples of my art, let me know what price range you'd pay for something in my art style... or if you'd pay at all, LMAOOOO. Don't mind the one punch man art i'm trash.
Dec '21
Jan '22
Here's my go-to reference for professional comic art pricing. These are in Australian dollars. Just add together the various things you'll be doing - thumbnails + pencilling + inking + lettering, it seems - and that'll give you a ballpark estimate.
From there, make sure you consider how long it takes for you to complete each page, and ensure you're being paid a fair hourly wage.
whatever price you decide on, make sure to split it by how many hours it took you, so you can have fair hourly wage
Focusing on hourly pay can price one's self out of the market, if one doesn't also look at what others are asking and getting for similar or identical work. Super-fast workers vs slower or less-efficient or perfectionist workers can end up with radically different prices (& hourly pay) for the same product. But it's really the finished product is that you're selling.
Buyers won't normally care whether I spent 100hrs or 10hrs on a piece, they just want what they asked for at an affordable price. I get it that pricing by the piece vs hours sometimes results in an artist getting low hourly pay. I understand that. It's a dilemma that sometimes makes it look like an artist is better off economically by working at the grocery store.
i didn't mean to price it only by hours of work, but it would be unfair to the artists if they were to make like 2 dollars/hr
MY art would be worth only $2 / hr. 
Seriously, how should the artist determine what is "fair" for themselves? It seems difficult to fix a number. I might take $2/hr if the alternative was no art gig at all. That would be "more fair" than nothing, maybe, because I get to do my art. Or I could take the cashier job at the supermart for $10/hr. That's much more fair value for my time but then I may have no time for art.
I suppose we ought to consider that working on art can be priced for either the labor or for final product. Dollars/hour might matter most (at least to the artist) when the work is a long, on-going gig, like working on a comic series for months or years. There, the artist might want to be paid a labor rate vs a price per completed page. But the person paying probably wants to pay per page (finished product price) & not worry about how long the artist stays up at night.
You get to decide on fair price for your work, but if you live in place where minimum wage is 10 dollars, it is unfair to make 2, you still need to pay for bills, food,etc.
Being artist and "your own boss" is hard because you don't know how to price your work, i'm not artist but i believe that they should make more than 2 dollars/hr if place where they live is much more expensive
I agree, if we compare apples to apples. Let me assume that we agree that what's thought/felt to be "fair" is subjective & differs from person to person, place to place. Also, I assume you meant the legally defined min wage of $10.
The legal min wage is an arbitrary number that applies to simple manual-labor. It doesn't consider important factors such as level of skill, difficulty of work, rarity of skill, or supply vs demand. I submit that those factors are super-important in art work as opposed to common labor. As such, art & manual-labor pay rates are apples to oranges, really.
Bottom line, I think, must be that each artist is content with the pay they get for their work, whether it be per hour or per piece. I choose "content" vs "happy" deliberately.
If hourly income is a personally important factor then an artist definitely should give thought to that when deciding what to charge, or even whether to accept or decline a bit of work. Their demoralizing conclusion, unfortunately, might be that art is a waste of their time if other employment brings much better hourly income. THAT, plus the risk of pricing themselves out of winning any work at all, are the reasons I tremble at hourly pay figuring too strongly for an artist who isn't already famous.
Yeah, if someone is newbie/ beginner they shouldn't expect to make a lot of money, however when i said minimum wage yes i meant "legal", but we need to consider that someone might live of their art (due to many reasons such as health, maybe they got "fired" due to covid,etc...)
But i wanna thank you for keeping this conversation civil, even if we don't agree on everything
I thank you as well for bearing with my longwinded explorations of the topic. I find it interesting & it relates a bit to some of my own efforts to price things that I collect & offer for sale. Some aren't worth the time in dollars but I feel like preserving them is worth something not measured by only money.
Looking forward to seeing you around the forums some more. Happy Friday to you. 
closed Jan 16, '22
