Kaorien wrote:Ah, should I charge for more? I'm seriously not good with pricing really. XD And I'm still living under my parents so I'm not in much of a rush to make a lot of money. As for how fast I can draw... it depends on what needs to be drawn/my motivation for it XD;
People will probably hate me if I ruin the nearly-free bargain by advising to charge more. XD *lol* But yes, you are very much underselling yourself.
If you don't need to pay for rent and food etc., and if your only interest in the game art is just gaining experience or having fun helping make games, it should be fine to have really low prices, but if you intend to sell your art, you should have a more fair price. Fair for yourself and fair for the others.
If anything also because when young artists offer their art for token prices like that, it makes art as a whole have low value. As a direct result, when artists who live of their art offer their services for normal prices needed for survival, people don't buy it, since they can buy instead the art sold at near-free prices by young artists still living at their parents' and not needing to pay for rent & food.
So it becomes a bit of a vicious cycle that lessens the value of art on the long run and make that skilled artists can't offer their art for such projects since the prices wouldn't be competitive. Often clients will even demand the below-survival pricing because they've seen art for that price and don't realize it's not possible for people to work and survive with it at that price. (Unless of course they live in a country with en extremely low cost of life, but even that has its limits.)
The rule for art pricing is to calculate how long it takes you to do each type of art, and how much money you would need to pay for rent, food, bills etc. (In your case you don't have to pay for those things yet, but just imagining how much that might be when you're on your own). Then, you calculate how much art you would be able to produce per day/week/month, based on how fast you could draw (hence having calculated the time for each type of art first), and you divide your monthly survival costs by how much art you would be able to produce in that period. In the end, you should obtain the amount you can charge.
However, of course, we don't have people commissioning us permanently to draw art all day long, so you have to adjust the price up a bit to be enough to survive of what commissions you get, even if you're not getting commissions all the time.
If you work as a freelance artist, little by little you get experience and learn to figure out how many clients hire you per month on average, and then you can adjust your prices much more easily.
I'm sorry for the wall of text, and I realize you don't quite need to think of it in such detail just yet since you're still living with your parents, but as a fellow artist I thought the information might be useful for you, if not for now then at least for later if you decide to stick with art professionally.
It's actually good to start free-lancing while you live at your parents', since otherwise you wouldn't know for sure ahead of time whether you can stand on your own/have enough clients to pay rent etc. every month, until you've done it for a bit and gotten used to it all.
I'm not sure what the average pricing in the forums here is because most tend to prefer to negotiate by PMs etc. rather than show their prices, but yours are definitely too low for survival.
If, like I was saying, you just intend to have fun making games and don't really need the money, it's not a big problem, but you might want to either adjust the prices or simply put a warning or a note when you offer your services saying that's why the prices are like that, so that it doesn't looks like that's the standard price everyone has. Otherwise it would do a disservice to the other artists.
It's okay to give your art out for free or almost free as long as you make sure to warn people that it's because you're in it for the fun and not for survival, just so that they know not to demand such prices of people who are working/need it for survival.
Again, sorry for the wall of text. ^^; Hopefully it might have been of help at least a bit. Just some advice from an artist to another.
So if you're interested PM me~
Where do you live or how fast do you draw that you can afford to price a sprite at only $5 and a full CG at only $15 and not have already died of starvation a long time ago??