Can you make money with your digital art? The well-known fantasy and sci-fi art website DeviantArt thinks you can, via its new (beta) commercial commissioning service, Dreamup.com. It’s nice to see them set a price threshold, of a decent $200 (about £130) for a finished picture — so there should be no eLance-style “race to the bottom” in pricing, no ‘ten illustrations for $10’ done by slave-style workshops in India or China. Dreamup keeps the cash in secure escrow until project stages are hit. Per-stage payments are available. One of the benefits should be that the artist’s payment arrives very promptly after the work is done, rather than the artist having to wait for months for a seemingly semi-mythical payment that’ll be… “in the mail soon now, dude, really…”
