How to price art commissions from the hours they really take
· 7 min read
Most commission prices start from what other artists charge or what feels fair, and both drift away from the hours a piece really takes. A steadier method: measure your next few commissions from first message to final file, split by stage, and price each tier from its measured hours times the hourly amount you want to earn. If you draw on a Mac, an automatic record of your day does most of the measuring for you.
Why guessing the hours goes wrong
Artists tend to remember the drawing and forget everything around it. The painting session is vivid; the reference hunt, the three rounds of messages about the pose, the export in four sizes and the invoice are not.
Commissions also spread out. A piece that feels like “one long evening” was often four sessions over a week, plus a revision the following Monday. And tiers behave very differently: a sketch, a flat-colored piece and a fully rendered one with a background are not the same job with more polish, they are different jobs.
So a price built on memory is usually built on the drawing hours alone, and the rest is unpaid.
What to count for one commission
Decide what counts before you start, so every piece is measured the same way. From inquiry to delivery:
- Messages. The first inquiry, questions about the character or scene, sharing references, confirming the price.
- Reference gathering. Collecting and arranging images, reading the client’s notes.
- Sketch. Thumbnails and the sketch you send for approval.
- Final work. Lines, color, rendering, background, whatever the tier includes.
- Revisions. Changes after the sketch and after the final.
- Delivery. Exporting, resizing, uploading, and the invoice.
Messages and revisions are the two stages most artists leave out of the price, and on a demanding client they can rival the drawing time.
Measuring a commission on your Mac
Punchcard is a Mac menu bar app that notices which app is in front during your day, by app name only, and at the closing time you set it prints a receipt: the top five apps with time per line, the rest as MISC, and a day total. It needs no macOS permissions to do this, and it never looks at your canvas, file names or window titles.
On a commission day, the receipt usually shows your drawing app on the top line, the browser for references, and your messaging or email app for the client conversation. That split maps neatly onto the stages above.
A method for the next three commissions:
- Note the start date, the client and the tier in a simple list.
- Set the closing time to when you normally stop drawing. If you often work past midnight, working past midnight explains how those late hours are counted.
- Each day you work on the piece, copy the drawing app’s time and the messaging time from the receipt into your list.
- When you deliver, add up the stages.
There are honest limits. Punchcard has no per-project tracking, so if you work on two commissions in one sitting, the drawing app line holds both. Export the CSV in that case: it has one row per session with start and end times, and you can split the evening by when you switched files. Drawing on a tablet away from the Mac, or on paper, is not on the record, so add it by hand.
A drawing tablet plugged into the Mac is no problem: the drawing app is still the app in front. One thing to know is that the count pauses when there is no input, so a long stretch of just looking at the piece without touching anything can read as a break. For most drawing sessions that barely registers.
From hours to a price
Once three pieces in the same tier are done, average their total hours. Then:
Tier price = average hours × your target hourly amount, rounded to a clean number.
As an illustration with round numbers: if a fully rendered half-body averaged nine hours across three commissions, and you want to earn 30 an hour, that tier is about 270 before extras. The same method gives your sketch and flat-color tiers their own prices, based on their own hours rather than a fraction of the rendered price.
Then price the extras the same way. A background, a second character, or a rush deadline each have a measurable cost in hours, even if you only measure them once.
If your current prices come out far below the calculation, you do not have to change everything at once. Raising one tier to its measured price and watching what happens is a reasonable first step.
Revisions and messages are part of the job
Once you can see how much time revisions take, put a limit in your terms: for example, two rounds of changes at the sketch stage and one small round after the final, with further changes charged by the hour. The receipt makes this concrete. A client who needed six rounds shows up as a long messaging line across several days, and the next quote for that client can reflect it.
Messaging time is worth watching even when revisions are low. Long back-and-forth before the sketch usually means the brief was unclear, and a better set of questions at the start saves hours on every piece.
Questions
Does Punchcard record what I am drawing? No. It records the name of the app in front and for how long. It never records window titles, document names, keystrokes or screen contents, and it needs no Screen Recording permission.
How many commissions do I need to measure? Three in a tier gives you a usable average. Keep measuring afterward; the number settles as you go, and it will show when your speed improves enough to change the price.
Can I share the receipt with my followers? Yes. Receipts export as a 1080x1350 PNG built for posting. Remember it shows your whole day at the Mac, not one commission.