"How much money is actually needed?" Topic

I am about to start a new career and will be making a whole lot more than I have ever in the past. I was wondering how much money is actually needed to hire a sculptor to make a range of 15mm figures, this includes making molds and having them cast. I am thinking something along the lines of not barsoom and 40 to 50 different poses. Any ideas? I am aware that Black hat has some stuff but I want something that is evocative of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books. In US$.

That all depends upon the sculptor, the quality of work you're expecting and the similarity between different poses and if this allows new designs to be created by modifying casts of previous sculpts.

Within reason I've always maintained that any sculpting job I take on will cost as much or as little as the client wishes to pay me, I'll simply do the best I can in the time they pay for. Basically it's about negotiation to try establish what the client wants and let them know what you can do so they can be sure in advance that they will get what they want for the money they decide to spend.

If you want to chat take a look at the link I posted a while back:

TMP link

The costs for 40 – 50 poses would be substantial.

Of course, a lot of the poses can be modified a bit, to help keep that down a bit, but still, you're talking serious cash.

Molds for 15mm figures will be about $2 USD a figure for the production mold and $4 USD a figure for the master mold.

That is if you want molds that contain one copy of each figure. If not then your cost goes up for the production mold.

For my figures I get about 34 castings in a production mold. If I put 8 of a single casting in then my costs would be higher.

You will pay about $150 USD or more per sculpt.

It depends on what you are doing, whether each of those 40 poses will be absolutely new or if they can be modified from existing ones and so on.

But lets say they are unique, you want 8 figs per pack and you want a pack per production mold with 4x a pack in each mold and four unique figures per pack x2.

With 40 sculpts you are going to get 10 packs. The sculpts will then cost about $6,000 USD, molds will cost about $1,000 USD including master molds.

So you would be looking at producing that ten pack range for about $7,000. USD

Interesting view of the economics, Pictors – thanks. Not that I'm planning to do that, but it does gove an idea of the investment required for that 'complete range' we all demand before buying a single pack of figures.

Peter

Yeah that $7,000 USD could be a low ball number depending on where your sculptor is located and how many molds you use.

If your really serious I have on thing to say for your success…

Kickstarter!!!!

Otherwise you will spend $8 USDK to make $500 USD

The numbers quoted here aren't in anyway unrealistic, but I would say with careful choices about subject matter and poses such that variants could all be based of previous sculpts the total could be much lower.

Having already paid for a few decent dollies to work from and over sculpt I've then worked 28mm and 40mm figures for sub £70.00 GBPUK sterling (approx. $100 USD)

Again if you're clever with how you plan moulds they don't have to cost the earth.

As I said earlier ultimately a project costs what a client is willing to spend on it. They just have to have realistic expectation about what can be achieved with lower budgets and how best to maximise them

For the "some stuff" we have in the Imperial Martians line I would estimate we have 120+ unique sculpts a lot of which were done from dollies, but a number of which are unique one-offs.

On top of that are the British, Prussian, Giant Tribals (which are really 30mm figures) and Lizardmen….

There are 80 production moulds for the range at the moment…

Mike

Mike

Hi please send me an email contact, then i will send you some images of 15 mm sculpts. robi1baker@yahoo.co.uk
I charge a flat rate of £50.00 GBP per figure