You've been needing to raise your prices for a while!

Your refined sketches look like finished products, yea.

The level of detail put in in even your sketches is worthy of a price raise.

The tough part about raising prices is that, unfortunately, the same people who agree with your motives may not always be the ones who CAN afford it.

Although, given your broadening reputation, I'm sure it won't be hard for others to afford it. :P

Your stuff is just fantastic, so I wouldn't say a price raise would be out of the question.

I suggest posting some 'sketches' before they ever make it to refined and seeing how satisfied people are with them ;D

I feel the same way. I will try to teach you techniques to improve your stroke qualities, shape break downs, and short hands for implying texture so you're not taking 3,000 hours on a rough with a lot of detail. There are definite tricks that involve kinda abstract thinking in the sense that you combine ways you see images to process things faster in your brain.

If you want to wrap your head around it with me I'll love to talk about it and see if you understand. I want to help you make life easier so everyone's needs are met. So you can draw faster and charge less, get more of a gradient of quality for people so you can charge what's applicable to you.

I think raising your prices is fair. The amount of work you put in is unreal. I'm so proud of what you're doing recently, you're pushing your envelope.

Definitely raise your prices. This is your day job: take care of yourseld, goshdang it.

As long as I can one day commission you again, a price increase is a fair trade to me!

(Desperately needs new Ah My Goddess pics)

What are your feelings on simply shifting to by-the-hour? Is it something you've already given thought to?

Never seen how your draw, just the pictures as they are posted so I can't say for sure what would work best. If you think you need change your income from these, I'd say raise the ink prices, and make the sketches rougher, or create a 'messy sketch' tier for something that you use a set timeframe on (No more then 1 to X hours spent on it) .

As always with the commission situation it's one part fair to you, one part fair to those who want to commission you. So keep in mind you can probably expect some people out there willing to spend thousands a month on commissions, while others can't afford the cheap ones. I don't mean give your work away for nothing, just keep in mind that keeping work accessible at a loss of quality is better to many then only having the option of a higher quality of work they could never hope to get.

i have this exact same problem x__x

Man, is this what it's like to be an actual artist instead of a lazy hack??
puts feet up on his desk made entirely of cut corners