End of May - June

During the end of the month I got a few cool things done, including a fun visit to manchester to visit my buddy. Outside of that I worked on one really huge commission (literally) and some other little bits that I'll make a post about later this week. 

A HUGE COMMISSION

This commissions was insane! I have never painted something this big but I truly hope more people want this kind of work done.
​I will be up front by mentioning that there was some "issues" with this commission, which was niether the clients or my own mistakes. Basically this is a 3d printed model, and 3d designed. I'm sure it works well in principle but this model lacks the fine tuned and tested feel of most 3d stuff. I highly doubt that the designer did multiple test passes (being that it's so large, I probably wouldn't either) so the model took many hours to assemble. The predicted work time for assembly was about two hours, the final number was nearer to six. This includes lots of pinning, sanding and readjusting and as such the model is "functional" but hardly the absolute best way to display a controller. 

The model is about 35cm tall and it is a bulky and fairly hefty print. The printer also failed to fully clean the model out, which means it began to leak resin during multiple stages of the paint job, this meant stripping the paint, patiently heating the model so that it expelled the resin and then re priming and painting. Finally, the feet and base where just simply not designed to fit together. I tried so many different ways but there was simply no way to get the feet to fit on the base, it just wasn't happening so in the end I sawed off one of the eggs and did a bunch of re-shaping, then finally re-inserted it. Every time I got the feet to fit there would be a 2cm gap between the legs and hips, and the tail was very specifically alligned too, so it was a "three things don't fit, all at once" issue. Very infuriating. It looks alright in the final thing, you can barely notice but I'm honestly shocked at how bad the fit was, it was a real fustration and added hours of troubleshooting, cleaning and assembly to an otherwise fairly simple order. There simply was no way to "glue that bit and come back later", sadly the way it's made means the feet, tail and legs kind of all need to be glues together at the exact same time, which is a terrible way of designing a model. I managed to make it work but I'd be lying if I said I didn't ruin a jacket this week with super glue and epoxy...grrrrrr!

I think for commissions like this in the future I will begin to re-introduce the "quote difference fee" like I used to with big orders. Often I told clients that since I couldn't see the actual commission in front of me that sometimes the quote is 15% too high or low, so I would adjust accordingly. Most of the time it actually ended up saving them money as I would finish faster than expected. The issue with the gaps in the legs, mis-matched feet to base ratio and the excessive "filling" this model required I simply couldn't stay within the time frame no matter how hard I tried. Regardless I finished on target and in time. I used a basic paint scheme to stay within the clients budget and the overall budget / quote increase wasn't that bad for the client, and we will work out a month delay payment plan or something. That's what commissions are all about, working with real people and having real conversations.