EXP: Nation Of Shopkeepers: Lost in translation

M O C K  U P S 

After I had researched and developed the mural's for N.O.S, I wanted to show the client how they might potentially look. As spoken about in my previous blog post, N.O.S has a lot of brick walls so my options were to embrace that or alternatively paint onto boards to hang. The pub had given me free reign over what I wanted to do, so I chose to display my potential pieces as being on the wall.

This was fairly simple to do, I went through the website GraphicBurger to find the mock ups that I was looking for (a plain brick wall) and it was relatively simple to go through photoshop and put them onto the wall (which is crazy considering last year it took me 2 hours to do practically the same thing for 503).

With the Pig illustration, I showed the colour version on two different wall types to show that it could be subtle (with the red brick) or dominant (with the white brick). I also displayed the Black and white version of the mural so that the client had some variation to choose from.
I chose to keep the skulls on the white brick just because they didn't stand out at all on the red brick, something which I included in my considerations part of the email to N.O.S.
With the Psychic and The Witch I did similar things and tried to show how they both could work for the client's space.


L O S T   I N  T R A N S L A T I O N 

I emailed the client the proposals and waited for a response. After 3 days (and the weekend) had finished, I thought I would email again. Again I was met with complete silence,  in the end I sent over 5 emails spaced out over 3 weeks. I tried to ring but every time was met with the manager not being able to make it to the phone. Finally a month later I went in, to talk to whoever I could about what possibly was going wrong. I was met with the discovery that they had chosen to go with a friend of the client's who had designed and done the work for free, they simply didn't want to pay the money for murals off 'art students'. 
This only really confirmed what John has been saying in PPP, you have to make sure everything is very official. Make sure that they have a purchase order, make sure there's some kind of kill fee in place. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't been let down by this, after my success at the Lifting Tower Project, i thought that this would be relatively easy and perhaps the route to go down as regards to freelance work. If anything at least this has taught me a valuable lesson in making sure theres some kind of payment upfront and to never under sell myself to get a job. 
I spoke to other artists who also had the same kind of let down from this client, but really is the client to blame? If other artists undermine artists by selling their art for free, HOW can we all get paid for our work. Too many times people expect art for free and if someone out there is giving them their talent for free, it only undermines us all really. 
Another one bites the dust, but another lesson learned I guess!