How does pricing for maps differ from other forms of art?

[Jalyha]

I too charge by the hour because right now this isn't my full time job, so every hour counts and I want to make sure I'm getting paid for it. The majority of my work right now is work I've made for myself for my own D&D group that I will then release to the public and self-publish (it does mean spending more time designing maps for my players as they need to be of a sellable quality afterwards). My style is hand drawn old-skool line drawing for battle maps (Mike Schley-esq) so they can take quite a while in comparison to say the digital stuff I used to do (but never sold). Knocking up digital work with pre-made items from the likes of RPGMapShare.com is really easy; drop shadow, blending and some lighting effects. The problem is that most people can do this to some degree using Dunjinni and such programs, so it's not really worth it for me, plus I want to establish my style and offer something different.

I see. I've never used any premade stuff in my artwork (I'd be eaten alive). I can imagine that would affect both the time involved, and the pricing!

As for Torstan's SOIAF maps, there was an offical atlas book released with maps from Westeros and beyond, The Official Map of Westeros with region and city maps. Pretty awesome (I'd like to look at them in more detail but I fear the spoilers!).

I bought that book. Lands of Ice and Fire, right? It was one of the things that made me decide to start mapping my world. I guess I just didn't pay attention to know that someone here made it. I guess I assumed GRRM did it, at first, but now that I think about it I should have known better That's fabulous. (Omg those cities must have taken absolute AGES!)

Okay I'm done fangirl-ing.


So there's a lot of variation in how the pricing is done!

[Midgardsormr]

I guess I assumed GRRM did it, at first, but now that I think about it I should have known better

Well, he did try to take credit for it…



I did some napkin-back calculations on a recent film project I worked on, and my efforts to roughly model most of the downtown and warehouse districts of New Orleans cost my client roughly $2400. It wasn't actually cartography, really, but the shot required a lot of the same kinds of skills and techniques. A few weeks earlier, I did a very bare-bones deckplan for a space station for $35.

And for some slightly different perspective, since you're a landscape artist and might appreciate this, I had a matte painter* as one of my mentors during my internship. He said he was paid $40,000 by a feature film for a background that took him about two weeks to create.

So yeah, a lot of variation.


*For those who don't know the term, a matte painting is a background inserted into a shot in order to make it look as though the actors are somewhere they are not, or could never be. The foreground may be real, but it's not uncommon for everything from about twenty feet behind the principle action to be replaced by a painting. This used to be done on huge glass panels, but these days it's usually Photoshop work. For examples, here's a reel that illustrates it: