Shazam!!

Where do you get the term "sick as a dog" from? Are canines typically more susceptible to germs than humans, are they poorly more often? Maybe one dog cold is the equivalent of seven human colds? *ponders*

I was beginning to think I might be Bruce Willis from "Unbreakable". It had been so long since I last succumbed to a common cold - or any other malady for that matter - I thought I had at last developed some kind of super power. But alas, it was not to be. Starting on Tuesday and slowly kicking me into touch over the course of the last couple of days, a cold has set in. What began as aches and pains and a general feeling of "some thing's not right here" evolved into dizziness and nausea before finally coming to rest as cough, sore throat and blocked nose.

I'm not a happy bunny.

Partly because I now have to continue with the mundaneness of household existence whilst suffering the eleventh plague of Egypt (yeah - colds and flu, they didn't put it into the final draft), but mainly because I have to do this suffering with the knowledge that I don't have any superpowers.

Boy, I'd love to have some kind of supernatural ability.  There are just so many to choose from, when people ask me, what kind of superpower would you have (and with the circle of friends I've got, this question comes up more often than you'd think)? I'm often over whelmed by the dilemma of having so many options, so many potential choices each with their own merits. I couldn't just stick with one, surely? Most superheroes can do more than one thing, if you're stuck doing one thing you end up with a very two dimensional ultimately boring character.

Sorry Ben, but, you're kind've lame...please don't hit me.

What superpowers would I have then? Mental check-list superpower breakdown!

Super strength, ok that's a nifty little item. Popularised by the boy scout of course, I'm not Superman's biggest fan. He's my father's superhero, not that that's the reason I think he's lame of course. He's lame for a veritable host of reasons, but it's not my dad's fault, he got into comics when he was a kid and comics were pants, he didn't have a lot of options, but he were grateful!!


With the super strength, on the plus side you'd feel very self assured in every wretched hive of scum and villainy you wandered into, and you might even find yourself secretly hoping someone will start a fight with you just so you can show off and paste them through a brick wall. Of course that will inevitably end up with a whole pile of dead civilians and you'll have no recourse but to turn yourself over to the police and....no... sorry, I meant, pretend it never happened and high tail it to Oa.

I will kill again...

Ok, so super strength is out. What about super speed. As a man with a powerful love of The Flash, this is definitely one of my favourite abilities, but the real world practical applications of being the fastest man alive? Um...might be a little tricky. What with sonic booms at street level, hurricane slip streams, not paying attention and accidentally carving a path clean through the middle of a fat man...super speed would be fraught with issues. And even if I somehow managed to use my power to travel through time, would I really want to meddle with history? What kind of temporal universe are we living in? To put it simply, am I Kyle Reese or Marty McFly, that's the real question here.

Doc...are you absolutely certain I have to be naked to time travel?

So with the comic book glamour of strength and speed cast at the way side of practical reality, what else is there, well...lots. More than can comfortably fit into anything approaching an easy to ready blog post. Once the flood gates of graphic novels and superhero literature have been opened it can sometimes be quite a task to close them again. However, there are some powers that have, in my careful consideration, definitely merited real world, practical approval.

The power of invisibility!

You're invisible, what's the first thing you'd do?

Whatever your answer to that question is, says a lot about who you are as a person. You think about that.

Being invisible at will would be awesome, wouldn't it? Being able to vanish in a crowd, hide from people you don't feel like talking to, get into movies for free. There's plenty of things you could get away with if no one could see you, it's not the most glamorous of powers I'll give you that, it doesn't woosh or bang or boom or do anything spectacular. That's why they tend to give it to characters that don't really merit much importance but don't want to be left out.

You may fancy her, but her power's still a bit rubbish.

In order for a superpower to be realistically applicable in every day life, it's going to need to be visually unassuming. Otherwise mysterious government types and the press will be all over you like a rash. Super speedsters will be shackled into enormous hamster wheels, forced to provide the nation's power until they die! Probably.

The ability to stop and start time, now that would be a great one. Unassuming again so it fits the bill nicely in terms of discretion, the whole universe will be put on pause except for you, all the benefits of super speed without any of the showiness. You could be amazing in a fight, you could have fantastic reflexes, you could nip to the toilet mid-way through a movie and not miss anything and of course, you could sleep in every single morning and never be late for work. Gosh, the practical applications of being able to stop time are phenomenally vast, and if you're careful about things you could get away with it indefinitely.

I've often mulled over the idea of telepathy and telekinesis. They're both very cool powers, telepathy is much more unassuming than telekinesis though, so for real world applications that renders the ability to move stuff with your mind out of the running.

Telepathy, well it would definitely have to be fully under your control, you don't want to go around hearing everyone's thoughts 24/7, you'd go insane! But, now and again when you really want to get to the truth of a matter, it would be marvellous to be able to find out what someone's really thinking. However, this does pose the awful dilemma of what do you do if you hear something you really shouldn't have heard, it's the same moral problem of reading someone's diary and finding out some juicy gossip, you can't reveal you know it without also revealing how you found out about it and then it's hello mysterious government types again. (Yeah, MI5 really hate their diaries being read.)

Even on a small scale, prying into the thoughts of close friends and family could be a terrible thing to do, we've all had our off days when we've silently wanted our nearest and dearest to just be quiet and go away - how awful would everyone feel if those thoughts were public? Hum...scrap telepathy then, ignorance is bliss.

How about the power to communicate with machines, a la Mika in Heroes? If you had the power to put your hand onto the screen of an ATM and command it to give you money, you'd never have to work again! Plus there's no moral dilemma because that was already addressed in the series when the kid explains that he didn't steal the money because it was...I dunno, floating around somewhere. I can't remember what the exact excuse was but in my mind it was something along the lines of the Superman 3 wage scam that Richard Pryor's character Gus pulls. We can fine tune the ethics once we get hold of the power. Wouldn't it be funny to be able to vanish money from badly behaved rich people's bank accounts! You could be some kind of futuristic Robin Hood!

So, in brief, other powers we don't want  include:

• Laser vision (Practical applications?) 
• X-ray vision (possible long term health implications - see Drawn Together)
• Freezing breath (discreet uses would be limited to beverage chilling, and no one wants to be the fridge!)
• Banshee shriek (very limited potential and not in the least bit subtle)
• Turning into rock (stupid.) 
• Flight (too many radars, other air users, satellites, too cold, not enough air.)
• Communicating with marine life (too depressing.)
• Stretching like a rubber band (Yeah, 'cause THAT'S cool...)
• Becoming encased in flames (very, very dangerous and far too obvious unless you work in a crematorium, and even then, they have their limits.) 

 Basically anything showy, blatant or designed only to deal damage, they're all off limits! Alright!?

What we do want are nice subtle powers that will make our lives really awesome but won't cause us to get locked up in Area 51.

So that's a yes to invisibility, temporal control and communicating with machines.

I'm sure if I gave it some thought I could think of dozens and dozens of other ideas, but right now all I really want is just the power to fight the common cold. Is that too much to ask?

The Satisfaction of A Job Well Done

Ah, bliss. I've ticked off another job from my noticeboard, I'm dividing my time now between making relevant amendments to the job I've got in progress (as and when the client requires it) and also the same-old, same-old work hunting type of thing I normally do.

The job I've just completed was for HeatCool, which is a Chicago based air conditioning company. You don't really get that over here, air conditioning. I mean, obviously it must exist, I'm sure I've been in some shops and felt blasts of cold air that weren't coming from the front entrance. It's just not as prevalent over in this country as it is in the states.

It's almost like a strange reverse world, or at least it was when I was over there. I was in a hot southern state and everywhere was fitted with a/c units, you'd walk past the open doorway of a shop and be suddenly struck by an Arctic blast, it was bliss, temporarily providing respite in the blazing heat of the American day. It's exactly the same in England, but in reverse! In this country you walk past an open shop doorway and they blast heat out at you, compelling you to stand still and attempt to thaw out your bones for long enough to perhaps be tempted inside. In America you actually catch yourself saying, "shut the door quickly, you'll let the heat in!"

Well, I'm glad that HeatCool like their new advertising postcard, I certainly enjoyed putting it together. Although it was a long and interesting road, I've saved all the variations of it so I can watch it evolve. I shan't bore you with the minutia of each variation in between the first draft and the final draft but suffice to say, it changed a lot from beginning to end.

First Draft

Final Draft

The brief initially was "pop-art" themed, hence why the first draft is very much in the pop art style. As I worked with the client and made amendments based on their requests the overall image changed somewhat until it ended with the final draft you see above. I think they're both equally pleasing in their own way and now I know more about air conditioning units, pop art, Roy Liechtenstein and the city of Chicago.

Sleepy Artist

Very tired.

Before I retire for the evening I thought I ought to perhaps blog a little something short and sweet. A picture's worth a thousand words of course, but I want it to have something to do with art or artistic principles. I'll make a meme, I decided, that contains the word "perspective" whilst simultaneously conveying an important message. Job done.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

 Continuing with the old hunter gatherer analogy, I have been out harvesting the fruits of the interwebs searching for succulent morsels. Whilst in this occupation, I have found a few really dodgy looking vegetables...

 Exhibit A - The Good Grief

“I have a model diagram and I need someone to design a diagram which looks like the model which Ill give to you.”

-          So...are we all clear on that then?

Exhibit B - The Bad Grammar

 

“A illustrator and drawist needed”

This person apparently wants a ‘drawist’ to bring to life the ideas that are in his head. Apparently it “shouldn’t take long.” I suspect otherwise.

Exhibit C - The Ugly Job Offer

“I have twenty illustrations that I need done for a fantas adventure novel.

There will also be a small amount of involved, as the final output will be for an iPad e-book.

Full color.

8.5" x 11".

Thank you kindly.”

Ok, definitely a weird grasp of the English language which implies possible communication difficulties ahead so that's ringing a few alarm bells. There's going to be "a small amount of involved" which really, could be anything. Assuming the poor verbal skills doesn't have you running for the hills, you may ask what’s your budget for these twenty full colour 8 by 11 fantasy illustrations?

“Budget: $30-$250”

Say what?! That’s a maximum of about £158 for the whole thing, less the percentage fee for using this website, that’ll leave about £140-ish which works out as £7 per illustration. SEVEN POUNDS for a whole illustration, assuming each fantasy illustration takes, what, five hours to do (sketching, inking and colouring...plus redrafts because you just know this guy is going to want redrafts)? That means he wants someone to work for £1.40 an hour, and that’s ONLY if you pay the maximum budgeted amount. And they say slavery has been abolished!

But you know what’s really, really bloody awful. Worse than the fact this guy is asking people to work for an abysmally small amount. The worst thing is, not only have 26 people actually bid on this god-awful job and agreed to work for this pittance but one of them has bid $30 and said they can complete it in 3 days. THIRTY dollars, that's how much they've valued their time at.

Maybe they’re really fast, maybe they can do all twenty illustrations in, I dunno, less than 3 and a half hours per image (because that’s what it’s going to take to do 20 in 3 days). So say if it takes them 2 hours per image, that’s 40 hours of their life they’re spending on this project in total. $30, minus website fee, leaves about $27 which translates to around £15, which works out as 75p an image or if it takes them 40 hours, about 37p an hour.THIRTY SEVEN pence an hour!! Now THAT is just plain wrong. What in the heck can you buy these days for 37p? What is she trying to do to us offering to work for 37p an hour?!

*rage choke*

Union!! UNION!!

Back Away Slowly

Alright, so I'm out hunter gathering as per usual. In between being hopelessly distracted by electric guitar versions of the Skyrim theme tune. Oh so good...

But rocketing back to the job hunt thing, you ever look at an advert and think, hum, working for someone like you might be as fun as being basted in honey and dipped in a barrel of fire ants, but that's purely conjecture. Take this advert for example:

 

What blind publisher did you use?

Just looking at this ad' raises a few question marks about what working for this person might or might not be like. Whether or not these suspicions are valid, one may not know. You'd have to actually work for them to find out and by then, it could be too late.

Behold, the fact that this person is a published writer (apparently) and yet doesn't seem to realise that the letter at the beginning of a sentence really ought to begin with a capital. And they haven't just done it once, but every single time. Leading me to hypothesise that either they genuinely don't understand basic grammar, or their publisher has a very patient proof reader, or perhaps their shift key has fallen off their keyboard.
Coupled of course with the fact they said there instead of their.

I'm not saying that I'm the poster child for perfect spelling and grammar, I too suffer from occasional mis-strokes, type-o's, genuine ignorance and simple grammar issues (such as starting a sentence with an 'and') but I'm not claiming to be a published writer.

It may be petty and pedantic I know, but if they clearly think so little about their adverts and will happily slap dash out a mindless request for an artist without taking the time to even so much as use more than one hand (possible explanation for lack of capital letters) then we're either dealing with an amputee, an unbelievably lazy ''writer'' or a serial master-debater.

One can only imagine that working for them would be something along the lines of
"Oh I don't really know what I want you to do, just sort've draw...a thing..with, I dunno, a hat."
So, you do and then you'll get.
"Uh huh yeah...I like it but, I dunno, can you kind've change, like, everything?"





And this will repeat, ad nausium, until you're not even anywhere near the original description you were given and before you know it you're getting requests to add trampolines and sail boats and exploding planets into the background of two ponies kissing as a pictorial representation for an elephant in a hat going on a picnic - or something.



I'm just saying. That's the impression I get from reading this advert. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but if experience has taught me anything it's that sometimes you've got to go on your gut instinct with these things before you end up sobbing over your drawing board as you redraft your sketch for the tenth time wondering why you didn't decide to become a milk man.

Oh yeah, and plus the very last thing at the bottom of the advert...

Let Me Tell You...

I'm keeping an eye out for work opportunities once again and once again I'm in awe of the lunacy of people out there. Why do people think it's perfectly acceptable to be ridiculously demanding in their requirements - such as saying the excellence of work they require, what they want submitting artists to do, how they want them to do it etc. Whilst at the same time saying things like "there's no upfront payment but if this book does well we'll all make some money".

Seriously, people, this is your book, not mine. If you want to see your work in print then work for free, it's your prerogative, but don't expect talented creatives to bend over backwards creating illustrations for you - for nothing! I mean come on, in this instance particularly, they're writing a children's book. D'you know what's one of the most important parts of a children's book? The pictures!! Wise up my friends, if you want a fantastic book and you don't happen to be friends with or related to an illustrator who's willing to do you a favour then face facts, you're going to need to put a little of your own money into this venture. Yes, if your book bombs then you're going to be out of pocket, but that's the risk everyone takes when they're trying to start their own business in this world, you can't just go around with your hand out saying "pweeese can oo do this, and this, and this, and this, and this... for fweeeee!"


Then there's the people with their projects and worthy causes, the project type of person is the guy (or girl - let's not be sexist here) who says "Oh I love graphic novels and I've got an idea for one so how about someone illustrates it for me...just for fun." or "I'm running a fund raiser for one legged orphaned chickens and I want some free illustrations."

First off, illustrate an entire graphic novel...for fun? I'm not saying it wouldn't be a little bit fun, drawing is fun, I wouldn't do it otherwise. But to slog away, hour after hour, day after day - because make no mistake, illustrating an ENTIRE graphic novel isn't going to take a couple of minutes here - to slog away at it in the sure and certain knowledge that you're just doing it for schitz and giggles is going to impact on your work. Your first panel will be a Leonardo (and by that I mean the artist) but by the time you're on the fourth or fifth panel it'll start looking more like a Michaelangelo (and by that I mean the turtle).

Playing devil's advocate here I can say alright, I s'pose what else are these guys (or girls) going to do? They've got a burning desire to see their script all fleshed out and they're hoping there's someone out there willing to work for free - and maybe there is, there's no harm in asking.

Or is there?

Where does one draw the line between it being ok to get work for free if you're a down on your luck student with a dream but not ok to get work for free if you're a down on your luck small business with a dream, or a tight fisted corporation with a scheme. Where do you say hold on a minute, I'm working my tuchis off, for you, for free, for what?

THEN of course they sometimes come out with the whole, oh it's an excellent addition to your portfolio, or, you'll get your name out there and fame will rain down upon thee, or, there might be more work available in the future and next time we'll pay you!

Ah yes, the old "jam tomorrow" argument. This isn't Alice Through The Looking Glass, this is real life. So let's sit down and work out what your budget is and what kind of art work you can reasonably get for the amount of investment you're able to provide. I'm not heartless, I understand sometimes people are working on a shoe string budget and I'm always trying to do my best to help out the little guy, but I'm not a total schmuck who's going to put my heart and soul into doing a ton of free work for someone, no matter how important their mission is to them.

And sod the one legged orphaned chickens!

Work! Sweet Blessed Work!

It's not all doom and gloom here at Knight Time Creation towers, no indeed. There are those beautiful moments when the scores of sent emails and the handfuls of potential replies turn into a sprinkling of actual jobs and oh what a feeling. It's incomparably wonderful, the high is so glorious it makes it worth all of the desperately disappointing lows one has to go through to get to this point.

At the moment I've got a couple of jobs on, which is indescribably fantabulous, one of these jobs I've actually just completed and I'm really rather pleased with it. It's for Appliances Online, who are bringing out a range (pardon the pun) of ovens (see...range...ovens...get it? Oh never mind.) Anyway, these oven people's lovely new cookers are in a variety of colours, they're called the Newworld Colour Collection and they're pretty spiffy. Why do they need an illustrator, I pretend to hear you cry, well they're putting together a Rainbow Cook Book, using the talents of 7 food writers and 7 illustrators each pair are given a colour of the rainbow and must write a recipe and illustrate that recipe between them.  Well, it was amazing fun. I stayed up most of the night working on the lovely Mango Lassi recipe I'd been given and the following day, it was complete and I'm very pleased.

Ahhh. *blissful sigh*

See, I don't just complain and rant on here do I? No. So there.

Why Are We So Special?

As a starving artist, I'm frequently to be found wandering the internet highways looking for work. Like the worldly wise tramp in the song "King of The Road", after a while you get to know your way around and where to look for potential tit bits and scraps. So, I was at one of these proverbial soup kitchens the other morning and I was looking at the variety of freelance work they had available. Not just for illustrator either, but for pretty much every trade and professional you could care to mention. They had adverts for writers, escorts, programmers and porn stars, they had the lot. As I surveyed these dozens of job categories I was suddenly struck by a slight difference in the sections, the illustration section was the only one that was peppered with little symbols that signified competitions were available.

Yes, this site has recently introduced a new "exciting" concept, the competition! Not content with seeing people scrum to be the lowest priced creative talent on the market, now they want people to actually work for free. They don't just say "work for free" though, no that would be too obvious, illustrators are too smart for that, no, instead they say "ooh, who can work for free the fastest?" to quote Tim Minchin "What, are we f**king two!?"

Even this guy wouldn't fall for it.

Seriously, illustrators, can't you see what they're doing? You're working, for FREE! Just because they're calling it a competition doesn't change the fact you're working for FREE, on the promise that maybe, just maybe, your work will get chosen by the client, thereby making you the winner and allowed you to get paid for your work (minus a cut for the site of course...)

The reality is, chances are you won't get picked. In the mad free for all scrum of desperation, chances are someone else is going to get picked, or the client will go away from his computer and completely forget he even set up a competition in the first place. Whatever. End of the day, you're left with a piece of work no body wants and you're not one penny richer.

But you know the think that ired me, and prompted this rant in the first place? It's the fact that the little "competition" symbols are all over the illustration sections, advertising, design, painting, caricature, cartoon, logo - they're all at it. However the other sections on the site, the writing sections, the computer programming sections, hell, even the hooker sections. They don't have competitions, they don't have "Who can write the most gripping novel? Winner gets paid." and they don't have  "Who can give the best handie? Winner gets paid."

I reckon she'd win...

Why are we so damn special, do the rest of the creative community took down on the illustrator section and just laugh? Are we, as a group, so gods damn moronic that we can fall for the painfully obvious "Let's see who can do it the fastest!" infant school crap?

Yes. Yes it would seem that we are.

What a load of horse s**t.

Give Me Back My Breakfast!

Why is modern breakfast cereal so soulless? When I was a child, not only was cereal a delightfully sweet sensation that brightened the early morning of yet another day of school based drudgery, but you also had the wonderment of finding a little packet of toy within the box. Perhaps it was a small car, or a felt tip pen, or a code ring...or whatever. It didn't matter what it was per se, but it was the fact that somewhere within the cereal was a prize and there were several to collect. It made it even more exciting. Plus you were faced with the moral dilemma, do you root through the cereal straight away and find the toy, or did you wait for the exciting moment when you were pouring out your breakfast only to have the toy land in your bowl?

Some pretty strange toys at times...

Well that joy is dead! Unless you happen to live in America, where they still have a glorious array of brightly coloured and delicious breakfast cereal, with toys. In this country we're forced kicking and screaming into the beige Cromwellian monotony of "healthy" breakfasts. Shackled to the empty mastications of bland bran and mindless muesi. Because it's good for us, because that's what we're told we must eat. No toys! Toys are far too frivolous and fun, no, what you want is a money off voucher for a long distance run, or perhaps some kind of buy one get one free triathlon coupon? Text this number, log on to this website, there's nothing for you inside this box.

These poor sorrowful children, waking up in the pre dawn gloom of another school day are faced with a hideous fibre soaked bowl of despair with nothing but the promise of money off EXERCISE if their parents follow a website link and are willing to pay for an adult ticket. What? What kind of sick, cruel joke is this?

Perhaps it's to get children accustomed to the nanny state over the top corporate hammering of eat your five a day, don't smoke, drink responsibly, exercise, love the friendly bacteria, plan for your future, go for a run type of world that we're living in now. A world where instead of Thundercats and He-Man, we've got people like Sporticus, who wields nothing more impressive than a damn apple and wants to jog all day long. You want fruit based superheroes? We've already got Bananaman, what the hell is wrong with Bananaman you souless, souless people?

This isn't Bananaman - but this would have been a fun show too.

Bring back Lucky Charms, bring back my little plastic toy and focus your bran fuelled energy at adult cereals, let the adults have their cardboard flakes of misery, they don't have any taste buds left anyway.

Continuing To Be Irate

I know, I know, it's the same old rant but it is so infuriating. Now, in my hunt to find more illustration opportunities I come across freelance type websites, places, as I mentioned in my last post, where aspiring artists beat each other around the head for the chance to prostrate and debase themselves for a tight fisted audience. Or something like that...

Well, it gets better. I forgot to mention the other delightful freelance sites, wherein, not only must you scrum with hundreds of other starving artists in these Dutch auctions of indignity, but you have to PAY the website for the privilege of having the opportunity to undersell yourself!!

I'm not kidding. Some of the websites charge you to join before you're even allowed to place a bid on a potential job, other sites allow you to place a couple of bids a month but then charge you if you want to go over your tiny limit, on top of all that, these sites usually take a tasty cut out of everything you manage to earn.

So if you pay to join these sites, then fight with hundreds of other artists trying to underbid each other, then actually manage to get selected by a client for the job - you then lose a percentage of your earnings.

Might as well go work in a fast food restaurant...

Always On The Hunt

Except, not hunting for anything diabolical other than work.

It puts me in mind of Tootsie oddly enough, Dustin Hoffman's character, Michael Dorsey, is schlepping from audition to audition trying to find work as an actor in New York. Every time they tell him he's too old, he's too young, too tall, too short...just not right in some way. He quite rightly points out that he's an actor, he can change himself to suit their needs but, they don't care.

It's a lot like that as an illustrator, but I guess it's a creative industry standard. You're doing way more legwork than you ever get back in terms of actual work, you're swimming upstream with thousands of other equally talented artistic salmon and there's a tiny handful of jobs out there. This of course leads to one of my personal bug bears, the dutch auction website.

For those of you who perhaps have been blissfully unaware of a dutch auction, or websites containing them, I shall briefly explain. Imagine if you will, an auction, although instead of the price rising in increments with the highest bidder succeeding, in a dutch auction, the price goes down and it's usually the lowest bidder who wins. This is unbelievable douche baggery of the worst kind, instead of buying something, as you would do in a regular auction, all the creatives bidding on these sites are selling something - namely, themselves. And ridiculously cheaply. I have seen shocking bids, absolutely shocking. Say for example a client has gone on to one of these websites and posted up a job looking for an illustrator, say he wants 100 images and he says his budget maximum is going to be fifty bucks or pounds. Yeah, that'd be 0.50 cents or pence per image, doesn't that just make you want to vomit? That's how it makes me feel, and then to basically see the squiggling mass of desperate, desperate illustrators clawing over each other to debase themselves for this tight fisted nobodies amusement. I'll do it for 25p, I'll do it for nothing, I'll pay you to let me do it!! Alright, the last two never happen, but that's probably only because the websites don't have that function.

It's just not fair and it's not right, and whilst I'm not guilty of ever doing it to that extent, I do more often than not, grossly undersell myself, and it kills me. I can't stand seeing a piece of art with a mind bogglingly over blown price tag, particularly if it's a pile of crap - everyone's a critic right? But still, there's got to be a line somewhere between underselling yourself, overselling yourself and just right. I need to find the Goldilocks band somewhere in all this madness. That sweet spot where dignity and self worth can sit in harmony with customer satisfaction and value for money.

I doubt I'm the only artist out there who's plagued with feelings of angst over how much one should charge or accept in payment for your work. It's art after all, it may have taken you hours or days, you may have put your heart and soul into it, how can you accurately put a price on that?

It's tricky, very, very tricky. Client's ought to know this, they ought to know that whilst they're well within their rights to turn down massively over priced art where the artist has clearly priced it with their heart rather than their head, but at the same time, surely they've got to think "Here I am, offering someone ten dollars for a couple of days work, that seems fair...wait, maybe...maybe it's not fair...maybe it's tantamount to slavery? Who can tell."

Meh, that's just something that bugs me is all. There it is.