A Commission!

first commission from my Facebook page! 

from setting up my Facebook illustration page, at the end of last year, i was contacted by a woman who liked my page asking me to draw a picture of her two dogs after seeing my post i uploaded of a drawing of my sisters dog. 

this was the picture i was sent to work from. this was a challenge for me as i usually like to work from photographs which are high resolution so i can capture as much detail i can to make it realistic. becuase it was in black and white, i was also restricted to the media i could use. 

i decided to go for a ink wash, which i then added detail to with colour pencil - because the ink dried browny bluey colours, i had to then match these colours up with colour pencils, this was hard to reference from the black and white photograph. however i do like the overall colour effect as it is quite rustic and wholesome. 

editing the colour to black and white to see if it looked better / a better match to the photo.

pricing worries:

because the client was someone my sisters knows, i was worried about pricing the commission incase they felt i was pricing to much, i didn't want this to reflect badly on my sister (though my sister wanted me to price it as much as i wanted). i thought about how John told us to think about it per hour, however because my work is detailed i tend to spend a long time on things and felt this could mount up. 

though i will beed to inquire about how to price my work better next year (level 6) i decided to ask for £60. i told myself to allow myself no more than 5 hours on the illustrations so i would be making at-least £10 + a hour. 

although i do spend a long time on work, it is usually when i do other things in-between as i am in no immediate rush or thinking about how much i will get paid for it, so something i should take from this commissions for further commissions, if i focus on the commissions and the commission alone, i think i will produce the final piece faster. 

sending the illustration:

as this was a commission for a solo piece, i had to send the original. this was also a challenge for me as over the last 2 years of uni, i have used photoshop etc to clean up my drawings to make them more professionally presentable (erasing dirty marks, using levels to improve the contrast and colours etc) so sending a 'sketched' original, made me feel very exposed! however it made me more precious about the handling of my work and the area i created it in - not to have dirty surfaces, and make sure my hands were clean!

i also send the client a email with my edited versions in to she could see the difference incase she wanted to print it out with the edit or even at different scales.