In deviantART, a person joins the website in hopes of becoming known and appreciated for your talents as an artist. After some time, you'll also learn you can earn something by selling your art. By selling you art, I mean selling your labor into creating a piece for a person to observe. The other selling is making a profit off of prints.

Now... why would one want to go about selling your art (as in labor)? To earn some money, a significant whatnot that allows you to buy other people's art. If you're going the PayPal route, this could mean some cold, hard cash!

How to Commission

Hate to say, selling your art require three key pieces: audience, skill and price. The difference between a successful seller and one that sells because they are desperate lies in those three points.

Of course, this is my take. Note that I'm not teaching you how to sell commissions. I'm showing you what things to consider when selling commissions. Honestly, I haven't sold a commission in a long time, so I'm not the one to say I know how to sell commissions.

Audience

This is the most obvious and the biggest factor of the three. Basically, the more "known" you are, the better you sell. Sounds easy enough, right? Coca-Cola sells better than any other brand worldwide... all because they are a very (and I mean VERY) known brand.

There's no single method to gaining audience, but a way to meter it is with the basic "Watcher and Pageview" stat. The higher the number, the more audience you have to promote yourself. To get this number higher, you'll just have to work hard to promote yourself (without spamming, begging, or otherwise... bugging others). In my opinion, it's unfortunate that the number of watchers is the biggest factor on it's own. This "special number" is also subject to countless things that happen to rise up on deviantART.

On the up side, there should be plenty of guides to help you on your journey to increase your audience. ^__^
^{And I need to read these myself!}

Skill

Before you go off and compare yourself to other artists, I want you to know that this is NOT what I was referring to as far as "skill" goes. When I mention skill, I meant your confidence with your skill. Lemme explain better...

When you finish a drawing that took you hours to make and look at it, you're proud of your own work, right? Once you compare it with another person's artwork of the same "caliber" (skill level and difficulty so-to-say) as yours and find that it receives more feedback than yours does (mainly because of the audience numbers), you'll feel disappointed.

Most people commit the same mistake about deviantART in general. This website is better classified as a social media rather than an art museum. Not very many people see that because social media is more Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr like. The deviantART website is basically like Facebook and stuff, but it has that added art feature that makes this site stand out in a different direction.

Just because someone has more watchers than you do, it doesn't mean that your art stinks and theirs is better. Instead... try looking at your art skills in terms of how comfortable you feel about drawing it. If you're not happy with your art (without comparing), you're the only one who knows how to improve it, even if it seems like you don't. Self-evaluation is just as important as peer-evaluation.

Pricing

This is the most difficult part for most people. How much should I ask from someone if they want me to draw for them?

Let's talk numbers first. You can choose to either have people pay you in deviantART points, real money using PayPal, or both. You can buy 400 on deviantART for the equivalent of $5 USD (not including taxes should they be applied). That makes 80 equal $1 USD. That's just to help you with your calculations.

I read this one journal article about pricing and liked what it said. Unfortunately, I didn't "fave" it (or bookmark it) to have it as reference so I could link you to it. However, I would like to share you something that was said there using my words:

Prices should be based upon your judgement of your invested time to get your current skills, not a price based upon the time you spent to draw it. In other words, a ten-minute drawing shouldn't be sold as a ten-minute drawing. It should be sold considering you spent weeks, months, even years practicing and enhancing your skills, hour-after-hour each day , just to be able to draw a full portrait the way only you can in those ten minutes. To conclude, practice also counts as it was part of the drawing process.

I will call this up again... don't compare your prices to that of someone who has more audience than you do. Unfortunately, people are willing to pay more to someone that has 7,000 watchers than one who has 70 watchers by a long shot.

Set the price to how you consider would be the right price, not the price people deem you should have.



And there you have it!! For those of you who will be first-time commissioners, this is my warning to you NOT to get carried away with commissioning. You get nervous about it before you open them and it's a natural feeling. You have spent some time showing off your talent with amazing artworks. Now you're going to see if the public will like it and buy your art. Don't feel down if nobody bothers buying your art. On average, most people usually have a 20 balance and shudder when seeing $30 commission sheets. Just price yourself right and hope for the best. ^__^

Hobbyist art and professional art are two totally different things.