Paintedfigs.com - High Quality Miniature Painting at the Lowest Rates on Earth
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| Working Together Service: Communication is Key! The First Pictures Professional miniature painting is a highly involving, consultative process. You and your painting service will have differing ideas about how the final product is going to look like, and you will have to work closely to make sure they match up. After you discuss color schemes, exchange images, and they begin work on your sample, expect them to send you large pictures of a fully painted figure or two. This is them trying to make sure they understand what it is you want, and can satisfy your expectation of quality. They really ought to tell you how they did the painting too -- it demystifies the process, makes them look smart, and gives you an idea of how much work is going into your miniatures. This is where you get to tell them what to add or change. This "drawing board" process should repeat until you are happy with what they are going to make for you. They may quote you a higher fee if you are asking for more work than they had expected to do, and this is fair. That said, if they are professional you should be able to get satisfactory work done within the fee discussed at the outset. Again, you should EXPECT them to send you pictures of the work, it is not enough to simply talk about colors and painting methods. If not, you run the risk of them painting the job differently from how you wanted. You should find this unacceptable, because it is. Service: Communication is Key! On Going Dialogue As professionals providing a highly consultative service, you should expect your painting service to be easy to contact. Barring weekends and holidays (which may not match with your calendar if you are trying a foreign service), You should expect them to respond to any email within 24 hours. If they are professional they will do sooner than that, because its in their interests to make sure they are painting how you want them to. Some services go beyond, and make themselves available to their customers in real time. If they're in your country or close to it you should expect to be able to call them during their working hours. Others will use instant messenger programs to offer "consult times" to customers, ideally several days a week. I recommend instant messenging, because its low impact, low cost way to exchange a great deal of information, you can save chat transcripts, and you will get to know who your painters really are. They should also welcome your input. Discussing paint schemes goes beyond exchanging a few pictures and painting guides. You need to be able to email them random ideas and shoot off questions on the fly -- this is your army after all and you need to be able to feel as personal about it as if you painted it yourself. If they are brief, terse, or in anyway discouraging of your further emails and pictures, then they don't really understand the "service" part of painting service. A good way to gauge whether your service is going to be open to communicating with you is how friendly they are. Friendly people like to chat, and will want to know about you, your army, its fluff, and what your deeper needs are. That said, some services may come off at first as standoffish or highly formal because the painters are just shy. When dealing with foreign services, exceedingly formal exchanges are more likely to do with their cultural understanding of what professional conduct is like. A note on foreign services: just because they may be halfway around the world from you, doesn't mean they can't communicate with you in a timely manner. Indeed, if you go to bed when they wake up, then you can set up a great cycle where you suggest something, and when you wake up in the morning you have pictures in your inbox of what that looks like. This "warp speed" illusion is very satisfying for both clients and painters. A good client, is one who sends their painting service a lot of information (it's their job to make sure they collect and sort it out). If you don't reply their emails for days or not at all though, then expect to find prices being hiked dramatically on you on future orders as they try and deter your business. However, if they aren't bothered that you don't have time to communicate with them, then they also aren't really that bothered about how you want your figures painted either. Avoid these sorts. Service: Communication is Key! Two way or no way Even if you have the most service oriented painting service in the world, their efforts aren't worth a dime if you don't work with them. Ignoring emails from your painting service is always a bad thing. They are writing to you because they want clarifications on how your miniatures are going to look, and its very important that you make THEM feel comfortable going to you with such questions. If you ignore their first emails about how you want the figures painted, you can expect not to get any others. They may think you are too busy to answer them, in which case they will not want to annoy you. The results will be well-meaning, but most probably not what you want. The more paint schemes involved, the more guessing games they will have to play and the more likely you will be disappointed. |