Why You’re Undercharging For Live Event Illustration

Live events have really gone into the mainstream over the last couple years, which means a huge influx of people offering the service but also a huge influx of people undercharging for the service.

I’ve mentioned people offering weddings or events for £300, which might work in the meantime when you’re booking 4 a week, but won’t see you through when the trend inevitably slows down.

But I know it’s easy to sit here and just bark at people saying they should be charging more… but pricing in the creative industry is a tough one.

It’s something few people are transparent about it, not many people’s prices are available publicly and there’s a million and one things that can impact someones rate such as followers, representation, previous clients, style, location.

Mix that with the response we get when telling people we want to be an artist ‘how are you going to make money?’ ‘But what will you do for work’ ‘how will you pay your rent’ ‘but what about a proper job’ leading to most of us having a big ol’ bit of imposter syndrome, a feeling that we should be lucky to get any money at all from doing something we love.

So it’s no wonder we all feel like we’re basically shooting in the dark when pricing work.

So instead of just telling you that you’re underselling yourself, I want to explain why you’re most likely undercharging yourself.

First up, don’t compare what you’re charging as a freelance illustrator to what you got paid at your 9-5.

It’s very natural to use this as a starting point when pricing jobs as it’s the only comparison we have access to.

However as an example, a 9-5 I worked was £27,000 a year, that works out to £13 an hour. So charging even £50 a hour means I’m nearly quadruple what I did before, I’m quids in right? Wrong.

In reality that job paid you £13 an hour whether you were browsing Insta, chatting to your colleagues, making a cup of tea, whatever.

There was actually a study that showed people doing an 8 hour workday generally work around 4 hours of it.

So maybe you’re actually earning £26 per hour of working and just have the cushioning of 4 hours to faff.

This isn’t how it works when you’re doing events, you only charge for the hours you’re sat at that event and drawing, not for everything else involved.

And there’s a lot of other things involved, so let’s look at it from a booking point of view…

The typical process of getting booked for an event is, someone emails you requesting availability and pricing, maybe they also ask you to explain how event illustration works.

So you reply to that email, they get back to you with a few more questions, asking what set up you might need and probably if you can draw any quicker.

You reply to that, then say they confirm, you have to fill out a new vendor form with your details so you get put into their system to get paid.

Maybe they have some more questions closer to the time, so you reply to that email. You check your supplies and realise you’re running low on paper and a few colours, so you either pop out and get them or order them online.

They email you the day before just to check timings and contacts, so you read through it all and confirm. On event day you travel to the event, get there early to allow for any travel delays or getting lost (maybe this is just me)

The events 10-2, but you get there for 9 just to be safe, 2 o’clock comes around, you start packing up, the client requests a few photos of the event and to email them the invoice.

2:35 you leave to start traveling home, go through your photos, adjust the lighting and crop on a few to look better, then put the invoice together and send it to the client.

3 days later the accounts team gets back to you and say you need a PO number on the invoice, so you email the client and ask them to get a PO number.

A day later they reply with the PO number and you update the invoice and resend over to the accountant.

Whilst sending you the PO number the client also asks for how many drawings you managed to do at the event, so you go through photos and try and add up and send that over.

30 days pass and you haven’t been paid, you email the accountant and he says it’ll be 30 days from when the PO number was added, so you wait 3 more days and the money hits your account, job done.

Everythinnnnnng I just went through is all ‘unpaid’, none of that was actually you illustrating at the event.

I did lump a few different experiences into one so not every job is like that, but just to show you that the hourly rate you charge doesn’t equate to hours necessarily worked.

Like I said about office jobs being 8 hours in the office but technically 4 hours worth of work, that’s similar to us, there’s a lot of admin and things involved with being a freelancer or self employed, and the time spent on those tasks can add up without you realising.

Because imagine you’ve got 10 events booked in that month and you’re doing all that with each, it adds up!

I’ve not even started on the time you spent to actually get booked for that job, maybe they found you on Instagram, maybe you sent out a round of pitches and they’re the ones that replied, maybe they found you from your website…

Everything I just mentioned above is all unpaid too, the time you spend posting on Instagram hoping to get a clients attention, the time spent putting pitches together and emailing them out, the time spent putting a website together…

So the ‘4 hours working and 4 hours of faff’ we were doing at an office job is now turning into maybe 6 hours of ‘faff’ for every 2 hours of paid work.

So now that hourly rate needs to be £52 to earn the same as what you did at your office job to allow for all the other things you have to do.

And that is a huuuuugely conservative number, most of us might be posting on instagram for months, working on your website etc and only book a couple of jobs,

Why? Because these jobs don’t happen every day, events are usually a few times a month, and you can book a few a week when it gets to busier times like the festive period.

So say you book on average 3 events a month, that’s 36 in the year, 9-5 people work 253 days a year on average, so that £27,000 salary I was on equals £106 a day.

But you’ll never book 253 events a year, so working from the 36 we can expect to book, to earn that £27,000 salary I’d need to earn at least £771 at each one of these events.

I know what some of you might be thinking ‘well if I’m only working 36 days of the year then I can do other things’

For sure! But like I said earlier, that’s 36 days blocked out for an event, but all the correspondence, invoicing, admin, say 2 hours per event, that’ equals another 10 days of admin, so that’s gone up to 46 days.

Then we chuck in the social media posting, blog writing, website updating, networking, pitching, practising and everything else to actually book those jobs…

Remember, even at a 9-5 you’d currently be getting paid to read this blog post if you did it during office hours, whereas if you’re self employed no client is paying you right now.

And this is all just to equal what you got paid at your 9-5, most of us go freelance or self employed because we want to earn more or work less.

And all of this doesn’t even mention the entry threshold it takes to do this job.

People with degrees tend to go straight in at a higher paid job, because of the 3 years you took out to get that education and to recoup the cost involved in getting that education/training.

So the 20 years you’ve spent drawing honing your skills shouldn’t be treated in another way, without them you wouldn’t be able to do what you do.

Plus this is a skilled job, it sounds silly but drawing and talking is a skill, as is drawing quick enough to churn out 6-8 finished illustrations in an hour.

And I’ve not even gone into taxes, holiday pay, sick pay, pension…

So you need to remember when pricing to allow for all these things.

So even charging £100 an hour is still looking pretty minuscule and that’s eight times what I earned at my 9-5!

My dad’s always compared my work to an actor, which makes it sound much more glamorous than it is.

But they’re not acting in a blockbuster every day, so the big payout you hear them getting doesn’t account for their agents cut, taxes, staff, all the time spent auditioning, all the promotion, all the work to keep themselves in the public eye, all the work it takes to get them presentable for a movie, all that prep work just to film for a few months out the year.

The role of a live event illustrator doesn’t exist without all the other things involved but I can only charge for the hours drawing,

But without all the other things I wouldn’t be able to be sat in the chair drawing.

Just to give an actual example of pricing, at my first ever live event job 13 years ago I got paid £100 per hour, for my first ever job. That was an agency paying me that so they would have undoubtedly upped my rate for the client.

So the £200/300/400+ you might see people charging doesn’t work out to that much when you allow for everything I’ve gone through in this post, because the money charged isn’t the money you pocket!

And one last thing I want to end on is you don’t need to be affordable to everybody.

I see a lot of people wanting to be as accessible as possible, but affordable pricing only works when you’re doing a huge amount of events, and remember the work you’ll be doing isn’t going to be any less just because it’s cheaper, drawing is drawing and admin is admin.

If you charge £50 an hour, yes people might book you more, but you’ve still got to do all the other things I mentioned, and you end up working for the same amount I earned at Tesco, it’s a skilled job so why should you be getting paid a minimum wage salary?

There’s a difference between being accessible and being undervalued.

We’re illustrators at a event, we’re not an essential for someone to live, so not everything needs to be priced as such, people don’t go into LV with £10 in their pocket and walk out with something. It’s OK to stick to your pricing.

So there we go!

I wanted to go through a technical way of looking at pricing, rather than just saying ‘we can draw good, you pay us good’

Because a lot of creative industry pricing can just feel like it’s plucked from thin air, and seeing £30 an hour makes us feel like we’re doubling our 9-5 salary.

So hopefully detailing it in this way lets you understand a genuine reason why illustrators charge so much, it comes down to the amount of time we have to spend on unpaid things.

But without all those unpaid things we wouldn’t have the skills to do the job, or people wouldn’t be able to find us to book the job.

So remember don’t undersell yourself!

You should be pricing based on the work you put in, ALL the work you put in.

Courses to help:

Business Masterclass - There’s a bonus module on pricing which gives you formulas and examples on how to price all kinds of work

Live Event Masterclass - Prepare you fully for live events, from drawing quicker, techniques to draw portraits and full body and what to expect at an event.

Wedding Masterclass - Hone your skills to prepare yourself for illustrating live at a wedding and be able to offer bridal commissions.