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

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. Uh here we go. Sit for the tips and not the rambling and not the story time stuff. One, paint your paint the armies and the figures that you’re playing with.

Find people in your local community and just go play with them. And if your stuff is good enough, people are going to say, “Hey, can you paint my stuff? How much would you charge for that?” The second way, paint your stuff, post it on Instagram, post it on YouTube, post it on TikTok if you have to, if you’re if you’re into TikTok. I personally am not.

Uh but just paint cool stuff, post it. In your bio, put commissions are open. People will come to you. I That’s the secret, guys. There’s no There’s not There’s not some magic sauce.

Um if you want to get crazy, you can find competitive people who are posting that they’re playing. And when I say competitive people, I mean like probably people playing Warhammer, uh maybe people who are doing well in tournaments, who don’t have painted armies or or fully painted armies, and just DM them and say, “Hey, I I’m a commission painter. Would you be interested in in hiring me to do commission painting?” I wouldn’t really recommend that. Um if if you are showing up to your local scene with a very with with halfway decently painted armies, people are going to come to you and ask you to paint their stuff for them.

It’s It’s that simple. Uh the hard part is pricing. Um for a typical model, what I do is I would start at the cost of the model. So, if a model at at GW prices is kind of crazy, but if a model is $35, to paint that to a tabletop standard, I would charge as much as the model is. But you have to think about all the paint that you’re using up, the time that it takes you to paint the model, because you really need to charge like factor your time in cuz that that is a that is a cost.

I would I personally make a lot of money per hour during my day job. So for me it doesn’t I’m not as good enough of a painter to charge my my business consulting and the day job rate to paint people 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, you know? But if you wanted to do it and I and that’s what I’d recommend doing. And this is the version that wasn’t supposed to be rambling but I started rambling anyway.

But if you if you charge the MSRP of the model, it doubles the price of the model for the person hiring you for tabletop standard or maybe slightly above tabletop standard. Go to SLG studio. com. That’s Frontline Gaming’s commission painting service. They list all of their prices for all their paintable models in the spreadsheet at the bottom of their pricing page.

Don’t mess around with trying to figure out how much to charge or how much or whatever. Just go to their pricing. Charge their pricing to people. If you 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.

You don’t It’s not rocket science, guys. Go to go to go to that website. Look at how much they’re charging for their base level tournament standard and go from there. They’ve done all the hard work for you. I’m finishing up my last bit of organizing in here and that table back there is the last thing I got to do.

But this is like the calm before the storm before I start all out 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. I just want to talk about commission painting and like how you could start it if you want to. I mean, it’s not rocket science, right? There’s really There’s three main ways to get commission painting clients. The first one is your local area and you do that by just going to stores and meeting people and playing and having decently painted models on the table.

And if you do that a couple times, there will definitely be somebody who asks you to paint their models. It’s that simple. Uh paint your stuff and show up to your local areas with painted stuff. And it might take a couple of weeks, it might take a couple of months. Uh I think probably usually, depending on how good you are, it might only take like the one time showing up to get somebody to ask you to paint their stuff for them.

And it doesn’t have to be amazing, right? Like if you can paint to a tabletop standard or like a GW battle-ready standard, there’s going to be somebody out there willing to give you money to paint their models. Uh so don’t don’t think you have to wait until you’re like winning competitions or you’re golden demon level or anything like that. If you have basic brush control, if you can do base coats, washes, highlights, people can pay you and you can you can learn to be better at painting while people are paying you to do it. And that’s really when I would recommend it.

When you get to the point of where you’re like competition level painting, it takes so long to paint the models, it’s hard to get people to pay you what that time is worth. So at that point you kind of have to be established, you probably have to have like an Instagram or YouTube maybe, and you have to have some way of showing off your work so that there’s kind of like honestly like clout attached to your work. Um and you don’t you don’t have to do it that way. You can you really like say if you want to paint a model and sell it for three 400 bucks beyond that, usually that means you’re like an an influencer of some kind because people recognize the value in that. Or the other way is you find somebody who is like the person who hires you to paint for them.

Uh usually that means they’re probably in your local area. Or if you’re posting on social media, they they might DM you and reach out to you that way. And then you just become that they truly become like your patron. And they they buy the models and they ship them to you and you paint them. I kind of fell in a situation like that in the past not currently.

Um actually I don’t know I I guess I’m painting nice things around me so maybe kind of that counts as that but he’s definitely not paying. Definitely not try I’m definitely not charging him like that. You know but you can it really only takes like one or two customers like that to really kind of make it a thing of like you are the person who’s going to paint for me. And again you find though you have to get those usually by posting on social media a lot and then putting your work out there and to get to that point you usually do have to be pretty high level painter. Uh the other way is you can paint models first and then post the painted models for sale on eBay or you can pre-sell models you’re not supposed to but a lot of people do it as they pre-sell the painted model on eBay so they put a model that they’ve already painted up and say this is a pre-order when you purchase this I’ll start painting it.

Um those those are also kind of hard to do because selling stuff like that is technically against eBay terms of service although everybody does it a lot of people do it. I don’t do it but again it’s an option you can do. Um I have if you can paint models to a very high standard and it almost always has to be either Dungeons and Dragons models or Warhammer models and usually Dungeons and Dragons people don’t really pay that much. Um occasionally if you get like a a really like a good DM who’s really into it they’ll commission you and pay a lot of money for high-end paint jobs on on Monster Manual monsters. But usually if you if you want to go the route of painting a model that you want to paint and then selling it and actually making money on it which is really hard cuz usually a painted model just reduces the model’s value is is the harsh reality.

What you can do is if you paint a known faction colors so like Blood Angels by the book Ultramarines by the book to a very high standard like very high standard. You can sell models that you’ve painted already on eBay for the ITC. That’s That’s really hard to do. Um however good you are at you think you are at painting, you probably need to be two levels higher, even myself included, you know? I think I’ve sold thousands and thousands of dollars worth of models.

I think the only time I use I also I don’t really sell painted models a lot. I usually keep stuff I paint. Um but I think the rare times I’ve sold models I’ve painted, there’s only been like two or three times where my paint job added value to it. So, that’s just something to think about. It’s kind of hard to It’s kind of hard to paint a model first without somebody commissioning you to do it.

So, there’s a thought for that. And now, I want to talk to you about why maybe you might not want to do commission painting. I mean, you take something that you love doing and you turn it into something you make money from, it makes it suck. There’s no no way around it. You know, um a lot of people say like I wish I had a job I was passionate about.

I wish I wish the things that I was doing that I loved doing, I made money from, so I could just do the things that I love doing. And it makes sense at the start, but soon what happens is because you’re doing it for money, you hate it. And then, instead of having something you have to do to make money, and something that you love doing that fills your bucket back up, you just have one thing that you do that you hate. So, there’s there’s definitely a fine line. There’s definitely people who can do the thing they love every day for money and the and the love not get sucked out of it.

Uh I’m not one of those people. I’ve I’ve done this many, many times in the past with many businesses where I’ve turned something I loved into a successful business. Uh and also into not successful businesses that failed. But, I’ve just learned that turning what you love into what you have to do to pay the bills always almost always ends up in it just sucking. And there’ll be a point, if you This is what happened to me before where I I tried to go like full-time commission painting.

I didn’t really try to go full-time. I I was just doing a lot of commission painting, like all the painting that I was doing was commission painting for other people and things like massive army projects or dioramas or big things like that. I got really good at painting over that time period, but it really kind of sucked. Like it turn everything turns into a deadline. Everything turns into like is this good enough?

Everything turns into like oh my god, what am what am I doing, you know? So there’s there’s definitely a fine line of like you might think you want to be a commission painter, but then you get into it and you’re like, hey, maybe maybe it’s better for me to go work a 9-5 and make x amount of money that I need and then have these other hours to paint versus like I spent 12 hours painting today and I can’t even afford to buy myself dinner tonight, you know? So it’s just things to think about. Uh see you tomorrow where all hell breaks loose. I got to go get some sleep so I’m ready for it.

But I I hope this was useful to somebody.