I am relatively new to this community, but already have a great deal of respect for its members and trust their feedback and comments.

As such, I was hoping to hear from you in regards to how much it would be reasonable to charge for repainting models.

I have a link to my repaints in my signature below.

Please take a look at them and let me know what you feel would be a fair price to pay for the models.

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Red7

As someone in the commission painting business, there's really 2 things you need to consider; what people are willing to pay and what you feel your time is worth. The former you can only really work out through experimentation, maybe ask some local players what they'd be happy to pay for your work. The latter is entirely subjective.

A lot of people will tell you that you should aim for a minimum hourly wage with your prices, but that instantly means that a lot of undercutting can occur by painters that either live in countries with a lower minimum wage (there's a lot of commission studios in Eastern Europe, partly for this reason) or simply don't go for that (for example, I have a flat rate for 28mm minis whether they take me 1 hour or 5). My philosophy here is simply what I'd feel comfortable earning and not feel like I'm short-changing myself. It's often well short of any minimum wage per hour, but at the same time, I love painting so it's not really something I consider 'work' even when it's for other people. With that in mind, I can charge less and still feel like I'm being fairly compensated.

Your work is definitely up to scratch, and seeing as its complete repaints rather than just improving the existing paintjob, there's clearly a lot of work involved. Personally, I charge £10+postage for a single small-base X-wing full repaint, £15+postage for a Large ship that'll take a lot longer. Obviously that might not be any help to you, as you may value your own time or quality of work differently, but there's sadly no hard and fast rule here.

In short, you need to find the spot where people are willing to pay, and where you are getting fairly paid for the time/effort/quality involved. Ask around locally, see if anyone's interested, build up a portfolio, set up a web page with info and examples if you're looking to sell outside your local area.

Hope that's of some use!

For mid tabletop quality (which is what I'd define what I've seen in your thread as) I usually charge approx 1-2X the cost of the model I paint, but that's for friends and such since I don't have any kind of painting business and I just consider painting to be a hobby that can help offset the cost of my other hobbies (specifically the gaming aspect of miniature gaming). I'd lean towards the lower end of the curve since FF tends to do a good bit of the work for you with X-Wing - so for small X-Wing models you'd be looking at $15-20 and for large models closer to $30-40.

If the paint job is complicated enough that you can't really use the stock paint as a base then I'd lean more towards $20-30 for small ships and $40-50 for large.

That does help. Thank you both of the feedback.

You are both quite close in your pricing suggestions.

Which shows that this is an accurate price range.

Thank you again for the feedback.

Wish me luck!

Good luck, hope you get some work! Only other advice that I'll give is that if, at any point, painting other people's minis stops you enjoying painting your own, and painting becomes more of a chore than something you enjoy, there's no harm in stepping away for a while. Better that than killing your enthusiasm entirely.

Sound advice! Thank you.

Think how much your day is worth to you, multiply that by how many days it takes you in total, with all the relevant travelling around to ick up paints and supplies, packaging things for postage, posting them, doing administrative work etc, to paint a model on commission (bearing in mind time savings from working in batches etc), and charge that. If people aren't willing to pay that much, consider whether you are willing to charge less, for the love of doing it, but bear in mind that love don't buy x-wings.

There's a good youtube vid I saw recently about this which I'll link up when I get home from work.

For those of you doing commission work, how do you go about purchasing models to paint for customers, money up front/ deposits, etc...?

They either provide the model or they pay for the model upfront.

I am in Canada and I have someone from the States interested in my work.

How do you guys go about arranging payment?

Paypal, checks, other?...

PayPal/cash/check - whatever works for you.

I'd charge cost of materials (like if you have to buy the model) + half of painting upfront (no refunds) and the other half of painting upon completion before delivery. That way, if the customer decides they don't want to pay, you're not out anything and should be able to easily sell the model for the remainder of what you're owed.