Baneling sculpture is done

On March 01 2012 07:17 DanielHetberg wrote:

It all comes down to "how much do I want/need to earn per hour (and am I paying my taxes?)". From start to end, I think I spent about 20 hours on the baneling, about 100 or so on the ultralisk. In my professional life, I shoot for 25 euros/hour before taxes (which - when combined with social security payments - are fairly high in germany). Most professional artists get much less (let's not use the word "earn" in this context) but probably at least half of that. At 12.50 an hour, an ultralisk clocks in at 1250,- (about $1700), a baneling might go for $350. Raw materials are negligible in comparison, since stones are mostly dirt cheap. Including tool wear and tear might add a bit to the total cost, but not much.

Not sure about this, but pros might actually take _longer_ than me in terms of hours, because even though they're pros and better and faster at what they do, sculpting stones is physical work. I'm not sure you can do that for eight hours straight and maintain the speed and focus I can when doing two or three hours at a time, with plenty of rest in between.

This boils down to: Stone originals are prohibitively expensive (in my opinion).

One time-honored alternative is to make casts of the original. It's additional effort to create the mold, but you end up with something around 20 copies of your original. There are tons of materials to choose from, I'm going for something close to the original material and bought some (allegedly) high quality gypsum powder. I have read a book detailing the process, and in theory it's pretty straightforward, but I can't tell you how long it takes to create the mold, and how much time a casting takes (including finishing touches etc). If I was doing this professionally, one of my casts would go for (cost of original + cost of creating the mold) divided by (number of successful casts) + (material and time cost per cast).

For the baneling, a mold should be actually quite straightforward, with two parts and not much silicone material required - let's say a couple of hours, and the time effort for doing the casts (mixing material, pouring, removing air bubbles, de-casting, finishing) might come out to one(?) hour per cast, so one (numbered and signed!) cast might go for around $35. If I'm assuming I'm not able to sell the equivalent of 100% of my working time, as most craftsmen rightly assume, I'd mark that up to around $50. For the ultralisk, making the mold would probably be more time-consuming (10 hours?) but less so in relative terms (since it took 100 hours to make it). If I'm not totally off, a final figure for an ultra cast would be around $250.

Pros would further reduce the cost per cast by not making the original from stone, but rather from polymer clay (sculpey) which is way faster to work with, if you know what you're doing.

So there you go. Hand-crafting anything takes time, and if you pay the maker at least somewhat decently, it's accordingly expensive. Which is the reason why we typically played with mass-produced plastic barbie dolls or action figures as children. Or why mostly every big brand name you can think of exploits people in low-wage countries in order to provide us with cheap goods.