Market Research

I have been looking into pricing my prototypes, in order to offer desirable prices for my commissions. To do this ive looked at similar artists looking at commissions, and companies offering the same social networking commissions as myself.

After looking into companies such as cartoonize.net, befunky.com, zwinky.com and cartoonyourworld.com it's clear that most of these sites, advertised through mini ad's on facebook don't actually offer custom caricatures of clients. But rather they use programs and effects available through software similar to photoshop to edit a clients photo and achieve a drawn effect.

These sites have not helped me achieve a pricing guide in the slightest, as they aren't really offering the service that I am. So i decided to look into online illustrators to see what they price their services at.

Drew Green an american freelance artist over at deviantart.com prices his busts at $25 with additional costs for backgrounds. This converts to about £15. However I do not believe this is a desirable price for such a commission, especially from myself, a relatively unknown artist. He also offers full body character images with flat colours for $45 (£27). More info can be found here.

Another online artist, Luigi Lucarelli is offering similar commisions as myself, He created an Price Guide image which can be found below.

With this done and dusted, I can roughly gauge where abouts I want my prices.