Two studios quote £200 and £2,000 for the same picture. Neither of them is lying.
Most studios will not put a number on a page. We will, because the vagueness is not protecting you, it is protecting them. Here is what we charge, and more usefully, what makes any illustration quote go up or down.
If you ask four studios to draw the same character you will get four wildly different numbers, and every one of them can be justified. That is not a scam. It means the four of them are quoting for four different things, and nobody has told you which.
What we charge
These are the rates on our own site. They are not a starting point that doubles on the call.
| What you want | Price | What that buys |
|---|---|---|
| A small one-off piece of work | £450, fixed | One to three finished pieces, two revision rounds, five working days, layered source files |
| Ongoing capacity | £1,200 a month | One active request at a time, roughly eight to twelve pieces a month, unlimited small tweaks |
| An illustrator of your own | £2,400 a month | One artist working only for you, to your style guide, with holiday and sick cover handled |
We do not take work below £450. Under that the paperwork genuinely costs more than the drawing, and we would rather say so than quote £150 and then find reasons to charge more.
The three things that move a quote, in order
Usage, not effort
This is the one nobody explains. A drawing for your internal newsletter and the same drawing on a national campaign take the same number of hours and are not worth the same money. Professional illustration is usually licensed rather than sold: you pay for where it appears, for how long, and in which countries. A quote of £200 and a quote of £2,000 are often the same drawing with different licences behind them. Ask what the licence covers before you compare any two numbers.
How pinned down the brief is
A brief that says what it wants gets drawn once. A brief that says make it pop gets drawn three times, and somebody is paying for the two you threw away. The revision rounds in a quote are the studio's estimate of how vague your brief is. Two rounds is normal. If somebody offers unlimited revisions on a fixed price, they have either priced the chaos in already or they will start pushing back at round four.
Consistency across a set
One picture is a picture. Forty pictures that have to look like the same hand drew them, across months, is a different discipline. Style guides, character sheets and reference sheets exist so that volume work holds together, and building them is real cost that arrives before a single finished piece does. If you need a series, expect the first piece to be expensive and the fortieth to be cheap.
Things that should not change the price, but often do
- Urgency. Rush work costs more everywhere, fairly. But a studio that is always urgently available is a studio with nothing else on.
- Your size. A rate card that quietly goes up because you have a big logo is a rate card you should stop reading.
- The number of concepts shown. Six rough directions sounds generous. Five of them were never real options, and you paid for all six.
What to check before you agree to anything
- Who owns the finished artwork, and from when. With us it transfers to you the moment the balance clears, and that is backed by IP clauses in our own team's employment contracts, which is the part most studios skip.
- Whether you get the layered source files or a flat image. A flat image cannot be recoloured, resized past a point, or handed to anyone else later.
- How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as a round.
- Whether a human drew it, in writing. Every piece we ship comes with a signed declaration and the layered sources to prove it.
Our illustration page has the portfolio, the rate card and the contract terms in full, with no form in the way.
See the work and the full terms