Commission Some Art
Illustration Service
My job is drawing and commissioning illustrations for science fiction books and magazines (especially for Shoreline Of Infinity). If you are a writer looking for internal illustrations or a cover for your book, please fill in the contact form below with a brief outline of what you are looking for and I’ll get back to you with a deal. I don’t do freebies but I am willing to work economically to help get a project off of the ground.
I also do commercial advertising art on chalk boards and other signwork, including company logos.
As a rough guide this table gives a scale for simple commissions. Please be specific as to what you want. I charge for revisions.
| Single Page Monochrome Illustration | £125 |
| Single Page Colour Illustration (eg Book Cover) | £165 |
| Comic Page Pencilled | £85 |
| Comic Page Pencilled and Inked | £125 |
| Comic Page Pencilled, Inked and Coloured | £165 |
| Company Logo without intellectual property rights | £125 |
| Company Logo with intellectual property rights | £1125 |
Thank you for your enquiry.
Special Offer to Comic Writers
I often run into requests from budding comic writers with big ideas for a new comic story but no artistic skills, who are looking for an artist who will draw the first issue for them for a share of the royalties when they persuade some big publisher to pick up their idea using the newly drawn comic. These requests are often posted to comic creator discussion groups and always end up being shot down in flames by irked artists who point out the long hours of work necessary to draw and finish a complete comic book and insist on being paid for their time. This does not usually please the aspiring writer. However the artists have a point. A wannabe screen writer would not expect a movie production company to film his script for free so that he could then pass the movie around big studios to get the backing. So why should comics work any differently?
So, here’s the deal. What you need to be able to sell your comic idea to a publisher is a presentation. This should contain a treatment showing who the characters are and what sort of world they inhabit with some idea of what the whole thing is about. Any good writer can make one of those. A script for one issue would show the ability of the writer to put the ideas into practice. The presentation would be helped if the development art was included. This should provide character sheets for the main actors in the story and developments of any special props or settings that may be involved. A page or two drawn from the script would show whether it works in the intended format. Now, if I was making the art for such a package, I would spend a good bit of time on it so that the publishers would see the work at its best. Say there were three or four main characters, a couple of vehicles and a building that needed some development, plus the two comic pages, fully inked and lettered. At my rate of careful drawing this would take a week or two of full-time work to produce. What do you expect to earn in two weeks?
Expensive isn’t it?
Now here is the budget deal. I am willing to work on a presentation portfolio for a new comic in which I will develop two characters and draw two pages of the comic. The timescale will depend on how much other work I have at the time and it will cost £40 ($50) up front with a final £130 ($150) on delivery. I also get co-creator rights to the characters I develop. So there’s a percentage of future income due to me depending on how important those characters are to your comic. However, I wouldn’t suggest making a pitch with illustrations of two of your minor characters and, if you need a lot of characters to make it work, the price will scale proportionally and I’ll want a cut of each one that I give an image to.
If you think this is what you need to get your comic idea up and running, fill in the contact form outlining what you need and I’ll let you know whether I can help and where to send the money.
