Should You Do Commissions Live at Your Table?

Live commissions look great on paper. It's engaging content for anyone walking by, it justifies premium pricing since people are watching the work happen in real time, and it gives your table a reason to attract a small crowd that other tables don't get. It's also one of the fastest ways to tank your own sales day if you're not set up for it, because the second you sit down to draw, you've taken yourself off the floor.

The real cost is your attention, not your time

A live commission that takes twenty minutes means twenty minutes where you're not greeting people, answering questions, or running the register. If you're a one-person table, that's a real trade-off, not a free bonus. You're essentially closing half your business to run the other half. Some artists do this deliberately during known slow hours, treating live commissions as a way to fill dead time productively rather than squeezing them in during your busiest window.

When live commissions make sense

• You have a second person at the table who can handle sales while you draw
• You're at a slower event where floor traffic doesn't punish you for being heads-down
• You price them high enough that the time trade-off is worth it on its own
• You can cap the queue, so you're not committing to more hours of drawing than the con has left

Pricing needs to account for the opportunity cost, not just materials and time

A lot of artists price live commissions like they'd price the same piece done at home, forgetting that the con-floor version also costs them potential walk-up sales during that window. If a twenty-minute commission is priced the same as it would be off-season, you're effectively paying to do it out of your own pocket. Bake the lost table time into the price, even roughly.

Set expectations before you start drawing

Announce roughly how long a piece will take and whether you're taking a deposit or full payment upfront. A queue with unclear wait times turns into frustrated customers standing around, which reflects on your table even if the actual drawing looks great. A small sign with your commission price and rough turnaround time saves you from explaining it to every single person who walks up.

Live commissions: worth it or not, a quick gut check

There's no universal right answer here. Plenty of successful vendors never do live work and plenty build a whole reputation around it. The mistake isn't picking either side, it's doing live commissions by accident because someone asked and you felt like you couldn't say no, without ever weighing what it was costing you on the rest of the table.

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