On 1/2/2019 at 6:24 PM, TauntaunScout said:

If I were to paint a core set to my own rather low personal standard it would cost... $100? I can do it in a couple hours, and $50 an hour is about right.

Yeah, there's 33 figures in a core set (14 Rebels, 14 Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Luke, 1 AT-RT driver and 2 bike riders) plus two bikes and 1 AT RT. So lets call each bike a figure and the AT-RT two figures for a total of 37
2 hours is spending 4 minutes 51 seconds per figure and that's everything from unboxing to varnish spray I don't even think you (generic "you" not Tauntaun Scout) could reasonably expect to get them all assembled and primed in two hours.

I'm completely on the side of painters and other artists charging what they are worth and holding to that.

So, I'd charge $1000.00 to paint a core set and you're the one supplying the core set. (and even then I'm undercutting myself to give a nice round number)

As put above there's 33 figures plus three vehicles. At that scale of a project I'll be spending an average of 2 hours per figure and about 3 on the AT-RT.

I charge 15.00 per hour with a $200.00 non-refundable deposit and the end product is mine in the case of non-payment. I do an hours estimate when I make the price and if it goes above that it's on me and you don't pay above the estimate.

The hourly rate covers everything. My time, my supplies, my talent. Coincidentally it is also below the median hourly wage for a painter/sculptor/illustrator in my metropolitan area...labor market statistics are a wonderful thing.

If people don't want to pay that, it's fine with me. I have a day job, I don't need this to keep the lights on. But if I'm gonna do it I'm going to be fairly compensated for it. I'm not a scab.

1 hour ago, Zrob314 said:

Yeah, there's 33 figures in a core set (14 Rebels, 14 Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Luke, 1 AT-RT driver and 2 bike riders) plus two bikes and 1 AT RT. So lets call each bike a figure and the AT-RT two figures for a total of 37
2 hours is spending 4 minutes 51 seconds per figure and that's everything from unboxing to varnish spray I don't even think you (generic "you" not Tauntaun Scout) could reasonably expect to get them all assembled and primed in two hours.

You overestimate the quality of my painting! A squad of Stormtroopers takes me maybe 30 minutes of bench time. 2 squads at once would probably take 45 minutes. So yeah I would wind up spending more like 3 hours.

Now you have me wanting to get a stopwatch and hit the timer and film it whenever I work on models, seeing how long it takes me to go from a shrinkwrapped core set to a tabletop quality core set.... it could be the latest youtube fail compilation all in one go.

1 hour ago, Zrob314 said:

I'm completely on the side of painters and other artists charging what they are worth and holding to that.

I think artists are underpaid but to me that's sort of a sidenote to this Falcon project. I think that particular artist over-invested in too much of the wrong kind of stock, basically.

$1,000 for a really good looking core set is not that crazy when I consider what other hobbies cost: miniatures are cheap and it lowers people's broader expectations. Being as that at that rate, $3,000 worth of painted minis would be enough to play for a very long time. Send them 3 core sets, with Veers, Leia, Chewie and Boba to replace the extra Luke's and Vaders.

Then drop a few hundred bucks on pre-painted stuff from the likes of Battlefield In A Box and get a flocked felt mat.

You could easily spend $3,000 on golf, fishing, or a really good civil war reenacting kit. That's for people with champagne taste. If you're on beer budget, paint 'em yourself. 3 foot rule.

5 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

I think artists are underpaid but to me that's sort of a sidenote to this Falcon project. I think that particular artist over-invested in too much of the wrong kind of stock, basically.

$1,000 for a really good looking core set is not that crazy when I consider what other hobbies cost: miniatures are cheap and it lowers people's broader expectations. Being as that at that rate, $3,000 worth of painted minis would be enough to play for a very long time. Send them 3 core sets, with Veers, Leia, Chewie and Boba to replace the extra Luke's and Vaders.

Then drop a few hundred bucks on pre-painted stuff from the likes of Battlefield In A Box and get a flocked felt mat.

You could easily spend $3,000 on golf, fishing, or a really good civil war reenacting kit. That's for people with champagne taste. If you're on beer budget, paint 'em yourself. 3 foot rule.

I'd say I'm high tabletop quality. Actually I'd say I'm trash but people tell me I need to stop doing that and everyone raves over my stuff and my IA table loves my work, so what the heck do I know.

There's definitely a sticker shock thing, but there's always been that with art. My first commission this guy in an old IA group demanded I paint some marines for him. I tried to talk him out of it but he absolutely insisted I be the one. We worked out a price, I kept a shared spreadsheet of the time I spend on each stage and sent him regular photographic updates and he was totally okay with everything and loved it all, until it came time to pay me.

Then he threw a fit, "this price I should be getting display case work, this isn't display case."

"I never promised you that, and you've literally handled every single miniature I've ever painted. You know I started doing this 5 months ago."

"You never accounted for the time you spent."

"I know you accessed the google sheet with that. You saw exactly what I was doing and when I was doing it."

On and on and on like that. He never asked me for his money back which is okay, because I would have said no. I think he was trying to browbeat me into retroactively coming down on my price.

So I learned a lesson from that. My bad was that I went over the expected time by a few hours and charged for that. In the future I'll charge a flat rate (but also build in an overage). I also upped my hourly rate. I'll also get something in writing next time.

5 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

You overestimate the quality of my painting! A squad of Stormtroopers takes me maybe 30 minutes of bench time. 2 squads at once would probably take 45 minutes. So yeah I would wind up spending more like 3 hours.

Now you have me wanting to get a stopwatch and hit the timer and film it whenever I work on models, seeing how long it takes me to go from a shrinkwrapped core set to a tabletop quality core set.... it could be the latest youtube fail compilation all in one go.

Even speed freak doing it I don't think it could be done in less than 5.

Caveats on that. All models must include a base+wash+hilight. 3 Color minumum and some kind of basing must be done.

Also sure, you can do a squad of stromtroopers in 30 mins. Stormtroopers are nothing. It's those stupid rebels......

4 minutes ago, Zrob314 said:

Even speed freak doing it I don't think it could be done in less than 5.

Caveats on that. All models must include a base+wash+hilight. 3 Color minumum and some kind of basing must be done.

Also sure, you can do a squad of stromtroopers in 30 mins. Stormtroopers are nothing. It's those stupid rebels......

I’d rather paint a hundred rebels than twenty stormtroopers:)

I could accept a grand for a starter set... but for me, they’d have to be really beautiful.

And guys, I’m not THAT riled up, or trying to make a grand statement. Just something I noticed, and thought I’d share, and I am somewhat interested in discussing it with folks. That’s all:). Love to all Star Wars Legion players!

Except those guys who don’t paint their miniatures . F those dudes.

7 minutes ago, Zrob314 said:

It's those stupid rebels......

30 minutes for a squad of rebels too. The Hoth ones in particular take minus-zero effort.

@TauntaunScout I don’t see how you could complete a squad of rebels in 30 minutes following Terri’s video. If you primed them in a color, painted the gun and face and washed the model in a single uniform wash I still don’t know how you could do that. Your saying 4 minutes per miniature. If you can do that and end up with a mini you are haiku with then that’s fantastic. But that timeframe doesn’t line up with my experience and I don’t think I am painting super detailed models.

To be clear, I am 100% supportive of the idea that you can look at a painted miniature being sold or auctioned online and say “that miniature is not worth that much to me.” But saying prices are insane and then arguing that anyone can batch paint acceptable squads of troopers in 30 minutes and that should be the basis of the market value I just don’t think makes sense.

1 hour ago, BigBadAndy said:

@TauntaunScout I don’t see how you could complete a squad of rebels in 30 minutes following Terri’s video.

Individual results may vary. You can see how mine turned out in my painting threads.

Drying time in between colors doesn't count cause it doesn't require my time. I've painted 5 squads of those Hoth-styled rebels now, I'm pretty fast. But thinking about painting the bases, maybe it would take me more like 40 minutes of bench time. I always sandwhiched painting steps in between unrelated tasks like laundry, so I am unsure. Now I really want to leave a stopwatch at my desk and hit it every time I sit down till I finish a brand new core set! I suspect a squad of Endor rebels would take me longer. Maybe as much as 90 minutes a squad for Endor Rebels I'd guess. Might try a brown and yellow desert scheme too.

I have an a-typical amount of experience with model painting however. I started over 30 years ago at the age of 4 with a roughly 25mm scale Jabba's Palace diorama and haven't stopped! And many years ago, when I felt I hit the point of diminishing returns on painting for quality (given my lack of coordination) I specifically started working on my speed.

1 hour ago, BigBadAndy said:

@TauntaunScout arguing that anyone can batch paint acceptable squads of troopers in 30 minutes and that should be the basis of the market value I just don’t think makes sense.

It's not the basis of market value, but I'd argue that it impacts market value.

Edit: Couldn't help myself. I have a primed squad of rebels sitting around that I hadn't decided what to do with and now I really want to know how long it takes to paint a squad of Hoth-like rebels. So I put them on blocks, drybrushed them white, painted their faces, then, I painted the guns, gloves, pants, and a few assorted straps and things light grey. That's what I was most curious about because those steps constitute the bulk of the time and especially skilled time that it takes to paint my rebels. Time is 22 minutes 5 seconds. Including time to mix my own grey from white and black. Next up is two different washes, then a few white touch ups and a coat of yellow on the bases with lots of drying time between. I'll update this with more times and also put the data on my army thread. Next time I assemble and prime a squad of rebel troopers I'll add that time too. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: I'll put up pics of the finished squad.

The Duros slowed me down as I have to open a whole other color paint just for that figure's skin. Also the trooper with a ponytail slows one down a bit as I paint that a human hair color. I tend to just leave beards off-white, they look pretty good with the wash I think.

It takes me a couple of minutes per model just to clean the flash off and glue the models. I shake the paint can for 2 minutes. That's almost quarter of an hour before I even get started.

And I really don't like having duplicate models so 2/3 of my army is modified in some way, even if it's just head or arm swaps which then need filling.

I feel so slow.

Maybe if I leave the paint can on a washing machine I can shave off the two minutes?

2 hours ago, Katarn said:

It takes me a couple of minutes per model just to clean the flash off and glue the models.

Assembly and spray priming time isn't included in this. I had a squad laying around assembled and primed already. Next time I assemble and prime a squad I'll add that time to this. It's too cold to spray paint now.

A bit ago, I washed the models with a light wash. This took 7 minutes 18 seconds. A whopping 2 minutes of that was wasted mixing up my wash from scratch. I also spent arguably unneccessary time blotting the excess wash that had pooled up under the figures' feet by the time I was done.

Then I came back just now and did some quick highlights on the duros skin, and on the ponytail. Another 1 minute 45 seconds.

I want to let them dry some more before I add the dark wash to the guns and stuff, but it honestly would probably be fine to add it now. The thing is... I want to avoid getting lots of wash pooled on the base so I'm holding off. This will save me time in the longrun, like the blotting. If I am careful to keep the bases pretty clean, I can usually get away with just one coat of yellow on them, as they are already spray painted off-white.

So far we're up to 31 minutes, 8 seconds of paintbrush time. If I did the math right.

4 hours ago, Katarn said:

And I really don't like having duplicate models so 2/3 of my army is modified in some way, even if it's just head or arm swaps which then need filling.

I actually like duplicate models in a way. Makes them feel "like miniatures" to me. I won't use duplicates in a game where a dozen figures run around wherever they want. But in squad based games of units of people who are presumably practiced in similar fashion of drill and mostly source their possessions in a similar way, duplicates work for me. The exception is, I like to make a big unit of non-combatants to guard my deployment zone and those are usually an aggressively eclectic collection of models. 20 unique metal bean counters, priests, medics, cooks, launderers, etc.

Edit: I just applied a dark wash to the squads guns, grenade bandoliers, certain backpack details, and the commanders binoculars and goggles. This took 7 minutes 18 seconds weirdly enough, the exact time the allover light wash took. Both washes involved a little hemming and hawing with so if I was using pre-made commercial ones this would be potentially faster. I'm tempted to buy the exact brand/colors she used on her Scarif and Endor models and do a squad of each, but I probably won't. If only because none of my favorite gaming stores carry Warmachine paint.

Total brush time so far: 38 minutes, 26 seconds. Next is some white touch-ups and a coat of yellow on the bases. So with assembly and spray painting I'm probably going to end up looking at an hour per squad or so. Still not too bad for rebels. My original estimates were purposefully low for the sake of arguing the LEAST I'd need to charge for painting a core set. It will be several hours until the dark wash is dry so I might not revisit this squad till tomorrow or later, my weekend is pretty booked up. On the other hand, one could argue that white touch ups can be skipped and with just a coat of something cool looking on the base they're tabletop ready now, or were back when the light wash was applied. But I wouldn't sell them without doing the darker detail wash and white touch ups.

10 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

I actually like duplicate models in a way. Makes them feel "like miniatures" to me. I won't use duplicates in a game where a dozen figures run around wherever they want. But in squad based games of units of people who are presumably practiced in similar fashion of drill and mostly source their possessions in a similar way, duplicates work for me. The exception is, I like to make a big unit of non-combatants to guard my deployment zone and those are usually an aggressively eclectic collection of models. 20 unique metal bean counters, priests, medics, cooks, launderers, etc.

Edit: I just applied a dark wash to the squads guns, grenade bandoliers, certain backpack details, and the commanders binoculars and goggles. This took 7 minutes 18 seconds weirdly enough, the exact time the allover light wash took. Both washes involved a little hemming and hawing with so if I was using pre-made commercial ones this would be potentially faster. I'm tempted to buy the exact brand/colors she used on her Scarif and Endor models and do a squad of each, but I probably won't. If only because none of my favorite gaming stores carry Warmachine paint.

Total brush time so far: 38 minutes, 26 seconds. Next is some white touch-ups and a coat of yellow on the bases. So with assembly and spray painting I'm probably going to end up looking at an hour per squad or so. Still not too bad for rebels. My original estimates were purposefully low for the sake of arguing the LEAST I'd need to charge for painting a core set. It will be several hours until the dark wash is dry so I might not revisit this squad till tomorrow or later, my weekend is pretty booked up. On the other hand, one could argue that white touch ups can be skipped and with just a coat of something cool looking on the base they're tabletop ready now, or were back when the light wash was applied. But I wouldn't sell them without doing the darker detail wash and white touch ups.

I enjoying the breakdown, even if we work at different speeds!

9 hours ago, Lord Ashram said:

I enjoying the breakdown, even if we work at different speeds!

It's turning out to take probably 45 minutes of brush time per squad. I haven't gotten back to do white touch-ups and a coat of yellow or two on the bases.

So I'd still have to add assembly, spray painting time is negligible, particularly negligible per-unit if I was to spray paint a whole starter set on a good-weather day.

Still, an hour for a squad of rebels isn't bad. People vastly overestimate how much time this aspect of the hobby has to take: if you were never going to paint a model anyways, such a paintjob as these will not detract from their value and need not take a long time.

One thing I REALLY like about this color scheme is, the mistakes mostly correct each other away. Painting the guns and hands the same color grey lets you get away with being sloppy. The all-over shading wash often hides any instances of light grey paint accidentally getting on a white area. It also tends to make mistakes with the later dark wash unnoticeable.

After my first two squads I changed it up from the video. She uses a warm light brown allover shade, I changed it to a grey shade. She paints the face first, I drybrush white first: otherwise I found that drybrush gets all over the faces. Saves me fixing flesh tones later. Also, of course, I paint a squad at a time not a mini at a time. So that is how I'm doing this squad too. It contains my Anna Kendrick Z-6 conversion. So now among my 6 squads of rebel troopers, I'll have 3 different Z-6 troopers.

I hope I can avoid the temptation but I may yet get sucked into painting a core set to tabletop standard and timing the whole process. It's been interesting. More likely though, I'll probably just paint a squad or two of several different rebel color schemes and time them.

13 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

Still  , an hour for a squad of rebels isn't bad. People vastly overestimat   e how much time this aspect of the hobby h  as to t    a    k  e:  

I’m sorry, I know it seems like I’m just being argumentative, but c’mon man. You have already told us you spent the last 30 years practicing speed painting. It’s disingenuous to say “it doesn’t have to take long .” Yeah - after 30 years of training you can paint a table top quality squad in one hour - not counting assembly and priming.

13 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

ne thing I REALLY like about this color scheme is, the mistakes          mostly correct each other away. Painting the guns and hands the same color grey lets you get away with being sloppy. The all-over shading wash often hides any instances of light grey paint accidentally getting on a white area. It also tends to make     mistakes with the later dark wash unnoticeable

Actually this is an area where I can agree with you and I think a lot of beginner painters especially spend a lot of time that they don’t need to spend. Look at a rebel trooper helmet. That **** thing has like six distinct parts that you could choose to paint in at least three different colors and make your life a living ****. Or, you could paint the whole thing one color and it actually looks perfectly okay. Not like a display piece but perfectly acceptable. Now, I tend to make mine with a couple of colors but the point stands. It’s really as hard as you want to make it and the same can be said for lots of other parts of many models.

13 hours ago, TauntaunScout said:

my Anna K  endrick Z-6  convers  ion

This requires some elaboration...

13 hours ago, BigBadAndy said:

I’m sorry, I know it seems like I’m just being argumentative, but c’mon man. You have already told us you spent the last 30 years practicing speed painting. It’s disingenuous to say “it doesn’t have to take long .” Yeah - after 30 years of training you can paint a table top quality squad in one hour - not counting assembly and priming.

Well that's the whole reason for timing it, I wanted to know how long it actually takes. 30 years of practice but not of training! The only advantage I actually got from starting at the age of 4 is simply that, at that age, you don't know what's impossible yet. A lot of people look at a painted tabletop quality mini and think it can't be done by mere mortals. A 4 year old gives it a shot. "Not counting assembly and priming" has two flaws: One, anyone who doesn't paint still has to assemble so that time is a wash, and two, priming with spray paint isn't time consuming anyways. If the whole box of minis is assembled, anyone with a few old pizza boxes and good weather can prime them all in under 15 minutes I'd guess. Maybe when Spring comes and I get antsy to start a new rebel army I'll test this theory with a stopwatch too.

Remember, when this started, I was intentionally lowballing the time as much as possible, to give the benefit of the doubt to the opposing argument.

Quote

This requires some elaboration...

The Z6 trooper on the card looks like Anna Kendrick: Rebel machine gun specialist . So I put the Z6 on the female rifle trooper as it looks the closest to the card I think. Though having done both, I think putting the z6 on the ion trooper figure is a more effective looking conversion. I couldn't get the arms fit right on the female rifle trooper, but at tabletop distance it will look like they do.

If I do another rebel army based on a core set, I'll paint one squad of 7 models exactly as is, and paint the other squad with only 6 models, using a Z6 conversion and not bother owning an ion gun for that unit. The extra parts (ion arms, Z6 body) will go in my bits box.

And now for this... a handful of figures painted by me, aged 4. I haven't come too far unfortunately! These are all that remains of a Jabba's Palace diorama model kit that I painted up, and then played with as an expansion to my Star Wars micro collection toys. My other early paintjobs included disastrous attempts to repair playwear, and/or add detail, to micro collection toys. Then it was plastic dinosaur model kits for many years till I got into D6 Star Wars.

On 1/11/2019 at 11:41 PM, Lord Ashram said:

I enjoying the breakdown, even if we work at different speeds!

And the squad is done. White touch-ups and coating the bases took 5 minutes 34 seconds. Plus 38 minutes, 26 seconds brings the squad to 44 minutes of brush-time. Everyone has to assemble so that kinda doesn't count, and I tend to spray prime and/or varnish stuff in large batches bringing the time per squad to that down very low indeed.

On 1/12/2019 at 10:25 PM, BigBadAndy said:

Yeah - after 30 years of training you can paint a table top quality squad in one hour - not counting assembly and priming.

Actually this is an area where I can agree with you and I think a lot of beginner painters especially spend a lot of time that they don’t need to spend.

And here they are at 44 minutes of painbrush time. I coulda shaved more time off by making the one woman's ponytail white or grey and washing it with everything else (like I did the beards) instead of brown with a yellow drybrush. I could also have put on fewer grey details on the backpacks and not turned their collars into grey "scarves" and saved a few minutes but I think they look better that way. The Duros' pants are another place with skippable details: I coulda made those knee pads grey instead of white. I picked out the grenade bandoliers, several little backpack details, and the leaders goggles with dark wash, didn't need to but I think it looks cool. I mixed my own washes and my own grey, which added time, whereas a newbie is unlikely to do that. So I posit a newbie could do something very similar in an hour, or do this in two hours, if they watched the Litorco video. I had these ready to go, and the weather's no good for spray painting, or I would have started from scratch. However, even unpainted armies have to be assembled so that time doesn't count unless you're selling your time, this thread has sorta taken two different directions at once. If you wait and do several units at once, spray painting time per squad would also probably be rather low. The bases could use another coat of paint but they're fine for now, or if I'd used a darker color they'd be in good shape: they really just need a blob of paint over some bad areas, not a whole new coat. In the spring they'll all get a coat of matte spray varnish along with several other squads, won't take more than 2 minutes per squad maybe.

On 1/11/2019 at 11:41 PM, Lord Ashram said:

I enjoying the breakdown, even if we work at different speeds!

Now you have... THE REST OF THE STORY.

The trouble with a Hobby is it isn’t a job. So no one expects that it will be a job and therefore very rarely doesn’t value it as being “work”. Most painting is done by folks that use the work they do to self-fund the hobby part of what they do. If they paint a box of Stormtroopers they’ll charge the cost of a box of Stormtroopers.

I would say this has made gamers in general, far more likely to never pay a reasonable amount for the work our painters do.

17 hours ago, Amanal said:

I would say this has made gamers in general, far more likely to never pay a reasonable amount for the work our painters do.

And most people don't value the arts to begin with as evidenced by government policy and/or foot traffic in art museums, and most gamers seem content to *shudder* use unpainted armies, no one wants to pay more for the paintjob than they did for the actual model, the list goes on and on.

On 1/2/2019 at 6:48 AM, Lord Ashram said:

There is one guy selling a crashed Falcon for 800 bucks. EIGHT HUNDRED BUCKS.

It's down to $560 now...

I did commission painting for just over 10 years. I stopped when people started complaining that "This guy over here does it for this much, and you are too expensive." If I can't make at least minimum wage for the hours I put in, then it is no longer efficient to provide the service vs make money some other way. So the cost of painted minis on-line may seem expensive to some or worth it to others. Either way it is the time involved you are paying for. I could no longer demand value for my time as competition became far more aggressive in price drops that I was unwilling to do. The way of all business in the end. If something is not worth the price someone is asking in your opinion then its not silly or insane, its just not worth that much to you. The more painters that get into Legion to do commission, the more you will see prices come down and some painters just walk away.

37 minutes ago, Wes Janson said:

I did commission painting for just over 10 years. I stopped when people started complaining that "This guy over here does it for this much, and you are too expensive." If I can't make at least minimum wage for the hours I put in, then it is no longer efficient to provide the service vs make money some other way. So the cost of painted minis on-line may seem expensive to some or worth it to others. Either way it is the time involved you are paying for. I could no longer demand value for my time as competition became far more aggressive in price drops that I was unwilling to do. The way of all business in the end. If something is not worth the price someone is asking in your opinion then its not silly or insane, its just not worth that much to you. The more painters that get into Legion to do commission, the more you will see prices come down and some painters just walk away.

A lot of unintuitive stuff happens with supply and demand for hobbies. One thing to watch out for is, how long the cheaper painter's queue is. If I have to wait two years for them to get to my commission, they have set their prices too low.

The contract painting business is kind of boned on both ends.

For buyers, they'll balk at the price, but fail to consider how much of a person's time they're paying for. If you ask me to do a 10hr project and I quote you a price of $100, that's actually super low. In this case, I'm only valuing my time and expertise at $10/hr - cost of materials. That's probably going to come close to minimum wage after all is said and done. It gets even more annoying from the painting end because the customer in this case is specifically paying you because they consider their time too valuable or alternatively because they want your skill, and neither of those is worth less than the customer's time.

From the painting end, painters screw up the business hard. If it's taking you 2hrs + a model for basic troopers and they're not award winning quality, the painting business is not for you. Far too many people also do this as a side source of income, so they aren't necessarily concerned about actually making a meaningful profit off of their time and will massively low-ball projects. As a business, most painters cannot trade on quality, they simply aren't good enough to charge the rates you would need to to make the time per model worth it. It's all about getting stuff out the door with the best tradeoff of time v quality. There's also a question of workload. If I'm only working on 1 squad, the squad is going to be very expensive for me because of downtime I.e. Waiting for stuff to dry/set etc. If I have a large project or 2-3 running concurrently, I can use downtime from 1 project to work on another. If I take too many projects on at once, I get a huge backlog and people asking for their stuff.

The other big problem is that because most of this is somewhat amateur, there's no standard or default for anything whether it be time, quality, rates, whatever, so the comparison points about whether or not a person is worth it are all over the place.

TL:DR, painting for money sucks