How every project starts

Finishing one project and about to start another, we resolved to do some filing. Upstairs in the studio, there's an ancient wooden chest which holds our sketches. And you know how it is. Pictures leap out at you:

They take you back in time. They remind you of the lessons you've learned.

Lesson 1: stop the project now or continue till the end, and always charge a fee

All our projects, big or small, start with discussion and a sketch.

The point about the sketch is not the scale: it might be 1:10, 1:5 or 1:1 - whatever.

The point (for us) is to stop the project now, or continue till the end.

We’ve finished many sketches and gone no further.

But we’ve never gone further then stopped before the end.

Now the sketch is never free.

Work varies from a few hours, which is at least a day when you include the conversation and meetings:

It could be several days:

Or longer:

Whether hours, days or weeks, we always charge a fee.

We’re not giving you advice here. We’re just telling you what works for us. Everything we say is based on our experience, our characters, our skills, our studio, our marketing.

What we discovered is that it doesn’t work for us to sketch for free.

The main reason is, most of the work we do is big. Our windows cost a lot of money. If the client won’t pay the tiny fraction of the total which it costs for us to paint the sketch, we know there is a problem:

• Maybe they got rich by annihilating their suppliers.

• Maybe they got rich through Mum and Dad.

• Or maybe they aren’t rich at all.

Whatever the reason, soonest learned the better. It’s also good to charge because clients sometimes change their minds when faced with pictures which bring their words to life. For instance, a loving, cultured father imagined that Medusa, the Gorgon, would make an exciting window for his young son’s nursery. Immensely strong-willed and also short on time, this client had to see the sketch before he understood (as we had suggested) this subject was the stuff of nightmares:

There was one fee for this sketch, another for the sketch which he chose afterwards.

• No harm done.

• Respect enhanced, in fact.

• And the young son had sweet dreams.

This is another sketch which went no further:

The people asking us had no authority-in-themselves, nor had they sought permission from the building's owners.

But they paid us for the sketch, because that was the agreement.

We’ll stop here today but we'll say more about these “stop-right-there-OR-go-the-whole-distance” sketches in my next post.