How to Start Commission Painting and Why You Maybe Shouldn't

Transcript

What’s up, guys? In this video, I’m going to talk about how I got started commission painting, how you could also start commission painting, and why maybe you might not want to start commission painting.

The Quick Version

If you’re just here for the tips and not the rambling:

1. Paint the armies and figures you’re playing with. Find people in your local community and go play with them. If your stuff is good enough, people are going to say, “Hey, can you paint my stuff? How much would you charge for that?”

2. Paint your stuff. Post it on Instagram, post it on YouTube, post it on TikTok if you’re into TikTok—I personally am not. Just paint cool stuff, post it, put “commissions are open” in your bio. People will come to you.

That’s the secret, guys. There’s no magic sauce.

If you want to get crazy, you can find competitive players who are posting that they’re playing—probably people playing Warhammer—maybe people doing well in tournaments who don’t have fully painted armies, and just DM them and say, “Hey, I’m a commission painter. Would you be interested in hiring me?” I wouldn’t really recommend that approach though.

If you are showing up to your local scene with halfway decently painted armies, people are going to come to you and ask you to paint their stuff. It’s that simple.

Pricing

The hard part is pricing. For a typical model, what I do is start at the cost of the model. So if a model at GW prices is $35, I would charge as much as the model to paint it to a tabletop standard. But you have to think about all the paint you’re using up and the time it takes—you really need to factor your time in because that is a cost.

I personally make a lot of money per hour during my day job. So for me, I’m not good enough of a painter to charge my business consulting rate to paint for people, but I love painting. So I take commissions occasionally to kind of fund the hobby. I don’t try to make a business out of it.

But if you wanted to do it—go to flgstudio.com. That’s Frontline Gaming’s commission painting service. They list all their prices for all their paint levels in the spreadsheet at the bottom of their pricing page. Don’t mess around trying to figure out how much to charge. Just go to their pricing. Charge their pricing. If you think maybe you’re not quite at that level or you want a competitive edge, knock a couple bucks off. That’s all you got to do. It’s not rocket science. They’ve done all the hard work for you.

Three Ways to Find Clients

I’m finishing up my last bit of organizing in here, and that table back there is the last thing I got to do. This is like the calm before the storm before I start a full army commission, before I start painting a whole new army for myself, before I start 3D printing multiple armies for multiple people—all in the next 60 days.

There are really three main ways to get commission painting clients:

1. Your local area. Go to stores, meet people, play games, and have decently painted models on the table. If you do that a couple times, there will definitely be somebody who asks you to paint their models. It might take a couple of weeks, it might take a couple of months. Probably depending on how good you are, it might only take one time showing up.

And it doesn’t have to be amazing. If you can paint to a tabletop standard or GW battle-ready standard, there’s going to be somebody out there willing to give you money to paint their models. Don’t think you have to wait until you’re winning competitions or golden demon level. If you have basic brush control, base coats, washes, highlights—people will pay you, and you can learn to be better at painting while people are paying you to do it.

When you get to competition-level painting, it takes so long to paint the models that it’s hard to get people to pay you what that time is worth. At that point, you kind of have to be established—you probably have to have an Instagram or a YouTube and some way of showing off your work so there’s clout attached to it.

2. Social media. Post your work consistently. People will DM you and reach out. You can become someone’s go-to painter—they become like your patron, buying the models, shipping them to you, and you paint them. I kind of had a situation like that in the past. It really only takes one or two customers like that to make it a thing.

To get to that level, you usually do have to be a pretty high-level painter.

3. Paint and sell on eBay. You can paint models first and then post them for sale. Some people pre-sell—they put up a model they’ve already painted as a “pre-order” where they’ll paint another when someone purchases. That’s technically against eBay terms of service, although a lot of people do it. I don’t, but it’s an option.

If you want to go this route and actually make money—which is really hard because usually a painted model just reduces the model’s value, harsh reality—you need to paint in known faction colors like Blood Angels or Ultramarines, buy-the-book, to a very high standard. Even myself included, I’ve sold thousands of dollars worth of models, but the rare times I’ve sold models I’ve painted, there’s only been two or three times where my paint job added value. So that’s something to think about.

Why You Maybe Shouldn’t

Anytime you take something that you love doing and you turn it into something you make money from, it makes it suck. There’s no way around it.

A lot of people say, “I wish I had a job I was passionate about. I wish the things I love doing made me money so I could just do them all day.” And it makes sense at the start. But soon, because you’re doing it for money, you hate it. Instead of having something you have to do to make money and something you love doing that fills your bucket back up, you just have one thing that you do that you hate.

There are definitely people who can do the thing they love every day for money and the love doesn’t get sucked out of it. I’m not one of those people. I’ve done this many times in the past with many businesses where I’ve turned something I loved into a successful business—and also into not-successful businesses that failed. I’ve just learned that turning what you love into what you have to do to pay the bills almost always ends up sucking.

This is what happened to me before—I was doing a lot of commission painting. All the painting I was doing was commission painting for other people—massive army projects, dioramas, big things like that. I got really good at painting over that time period, but it kind of sucked. Everything turns into a deadline. Everything turns into “is this good enough?” Everything turns into “oh my god, what am I doing?”

There’s definitely a fine line. You might think you want to be a commission painter, but then you get into it and you’re like, “Hey, maybe it’s better for me to go work a 9 to 5 and make the money I need and then have these other hours to paint, versus spending 12 hours painting today and not being able to afford dinner tonight.”

Just things to think about. See you tomorrow where all hell breaks loose. I got to go get some sleep so I’m ready for it. I hope this was useful.