How does a guy get a career in building models. What a gig huh.
[:D][:D][:D]
try building really really good models (as in #1 at the nats or close) then put it on your table, and wait. occasionally (Read always) someone will attempt to buy your model, usually for a couple hundred or if you’re really lucky a grand. try that. when you have sold many many models, then try making a website.
You can. But more often than not it turns into a… well… a job…
I tried to turn it into a sideline type of thing and it just wasn’t worth it. At least not the way I went about it. The money was very good, but the aggravation…
Next time I give it a go I’ll have the advantage of a bad experience to help steer me in the right direction…
Fade to Black…
I figure a kit with after market part, paint, glue, and research material is about 75 bucks on average.
I probable spent about 40 hours on a kit with so so results.
Find someone to pay 300 bucks for it.
It works out to a little over 5.62 an hour.
Here in BC the minmum wage is 8 bucks an hour.
I don’t think it would cover my bills let alone pay the morgage.
I’ll stay a hobbiest, and eat, thank you.
I guess it’s all in the math:
skill level + expediency = ______ (insert results here)
If you’re skilled and you can work relatively quickly, then the results can be good and possibly even worth your time.
Just depends on what they want, what you do, what fee you charge for what you do and whether or not said fee is agreeable to the client. Also depends if your client is a royal PITA or not, but I won’t go there…
Fade to Black…
In my professional career (not as a plastic model builder), I’ve had maybe 1 client who wasn’t a pita in one form or another , also didn’t require a large amount of hand holding and constant redirection of thought from making changes.
But that is the nature of the beast of my profession (saltydog, and music city will confirm this .)
Yes, I’ve done some museum work, which is fun. But when you take a commission, especially if you’re an incredibly slow, hyper-self-critical modeler like me, there is no way to make a profit. I averaged about 80 cents an hours. The pro’s (and vast majority of true professional modelers either work in the movie industry or they make wooden ships) work fast and are very, very good, and they have contracts that keep the client from hindering the process, unless they work in the film industry. They endure a lot of crap.
Funny this came up, because just today I was remembering North Star Gallery, which was here in NYC on the Upper East Side among the art galleries. All they sold were models. Ship models, but some scratch-built planes and quite a few of those really expensive Italian 1/8 scale cars whose name I can’t recall right now ($5,000-10,000 built up). But they had a half-dozen or so people they represented, just like an art gallery, and there were “famous” modelers whose ships went for tens of thousands of dollars. I remember North Star auctioned a ship in the mid-late 90s, which was a shipyard model from the 1600s, for around $190,000. That’s not typo. So, build an adequate wooden ship model (this one didn’t even have rigging, far and away the hardest, most tedious part, if you’ve ever built one), and wait 350 years. By the way, North Star is out of business.
I used to get paid in hefty tax deductions from a couple museums (I hope the IRS isn’t on this site). But still, there is just a little bit of a thrill to knowing you have been paid, even once or twice, for playing with your toys.
Oh, and if you’re so inclined, I once had a roommate, another modeler, who found that he could set up a table at flea markets in Manhattan, of all places, and sell his models right off the table. I didn’t believe him until I saw it with mine own eyes. And his skills were no better than the most average modeler’s. He never took less than $200, either.
You COULD get a job at Monogram… Hey, its a job, right? All theresearch you need, you get, or just be a company photographer. See the planes you like, let somebody else worry about which rivet goes where, keep the photos for future reference.
I’ve been fortunate enough to land a few commissions over the past few years, but earn a living? No way! I think the best you can hope for is to have your commission work pay for your own hobby interests. If you get real lucky, you may even earn enough for a plane ticket to a major show/contest. But don’t quit your day job!
wibhi2 LOL, i certainly feel your pain friend!! being a residential home builder i allready know how people can become PITAs very,very quickly. there has been too many "Con"tractors in the home building buisiness around here that have ripped people off, that it makes it tough to earn a clients trust. but, i have found the following to benefit greatly: being honest, doing quality work, and being able to compromise some of your profit to suit clients, never show panic, always keep the game face on, you can do pretty good in this buisiness. i can’t see it being much different from trying to build up a kit for someone for pay. not being haughty or anything, but i believe i could do it, and make a profit. now, making a living with it would just spoil the whole “hobby” side of it for me. i’m sure it would grow tiresome in a short period of time.
going back to the money/time you have invested in a kit, then trying to sell it for $300 the hourly rate would be $5.60 thing. thats where you’d kick things into high gear. like the homebuilding industry, you do 3 and 4, sometimes 5 jobs at a time. i guess if you built kits for a living, and were reputable, people would be ordering them left and right i’d imagine, then you’d just start an assemble line and build 6 or 8, maybe 10 kits up and sycronize the steps so that you could finish them all within a couple of weeks of each other and quadrouple the profit in the same amount of time. thats the way it works in the home building buisiness anyway.
we have several “art” festivals in my area each year, and i have thought about building up some nice, shinny P-51Ds in different schemes, maybe a couple of schemes, make 4 or 5 of each. take about 12 models and set them on a table and mark them up for $150-$250 range and see what happens. if you sold a couple of them, that would be the money for the next Hobby Lobby 1/2 off sale!!LOL maybe put a sheet down for orders as well, to see if someone would like a certain scheme built up. i don’t know. later.
Blackwolf: with your photo archives, why not write a series of books?
Hey, brother…
You CAN get paid to make models, but it’s often a case of being in the right place at the right time…
I got my start with a guy who ran a model shop who sold airliner models - anything from 1/144 scale to 1/50 scale (ever seen a 1/50 scale 707? Holy Moly!!) - I brought some of my work to him and just asked him if he needed any help - well I got more work than I could shake a stick at.
But most of the posts above are right - unless you’re getting at least a grand for a model and pumping 30 or 40 out a year, you really can’t make a living at it - and I mean obtaining ALL monies and pay ALL bills AND save for retirement by modeling exclusively…
I have about a dozen clients, for whom I make models, master work, and resin casting, and I tell them straight out that I don’t build fast - they learn patience and can live with it because they know what the finished product will look like.
To get a start, why not attend a monthly meeting of an enthusiast car club - like a Porsche car club meeting or a Ferrari car club meeting - and take along a half dozen well built models of the types of cars thay they drive - I’ve done this before - it’s a guaranteed sale - and I got another half dozen orders from each visit.
The models don’t have to be “best of show” quality, cuz the full size car owners would probably love a model of their own car even if it had fingerprints in the painwork.
Then you can get specific - correct interior and exterior colors along with a decal of their license plate. Works a treat. I realise I’m talking cars here, and you’ve posted this in the aircraft topic, but the principles are the same.
The most important thing is to get as many people as possible who have an interest in the subject to view your work. And the wider the variety of your work, the greater the interest by a much larger cross section of your audience.
That’s something you have to work out for yourself - the conditions and market here in Oz will be different to where you live.
Good luck!
Lee is right, and especially about giving people an honest and reasonable idea of how fast or slow you work. I’ve told them straight out every time: I work slowly. My commissions I have used – I got most of the non-museum commissions (no, I am by no means a museum-level modeler, I just took easy jobs, once it was even a V-1 in 1/48, maybe five or six parts and mottled paint job… Before I got off on that, as I was saying, I got many of my commissions by word of mouth, many or most were ANG pilots who now worked for, say, airlines and the all wanted a model of the a/c they flew while on active duty, or even in combat in Vietnam. I never tried to make money off them. I just used it as an excuse to put every single aftermarket thing I could never afford myself on the airplane. so I was building 1/48 scale Phantoms that cost $250-275, no labor cost added!
That roommate I mentioned above who sold at flea markets (the art festival idea mentioned above is a great one, by the way) once took a commission for a Navy version of the ASW version of the Constellation. It was a father’s day present from the children of a former Navy pilot. I felt sorry for them, because they didn’t know a good model from squat, and my roomie know it. So instead of looking in the Squadron catalogue and seeing that Heller made one right out of the box, this guy, not known for being eithical to begin with, took something like Miliput, and made two lumps he called radomes and stuck them to this civilian Connie kit, then painted it gray and white with some bogus markings form his spares box.
Then he charged the children of this guy something like $250 for his $22.00 in materials and less than two days work. The model looked exactly as you would imagine, and those poor young people did not know the difference between that and a museum model. But I’m sure their father did when he opened it on Father’s Day.
I may be slow, and I’ll never be a Shep Paine, but I never gave anyone less than my best effort and a fair price.
My motto exactly.
I don’t build to please them. I build to please MYSELF - then I sell them their models. If I’m happy with it, then it’s good enough to sell.