I forgot to share this pic back from San Japan this year :) I’m really in love with this cosplay, honestly~ Costume by my uber talented wifey, you can find more of my cosplay here.
Anyone here ship Shadow Kannao? (Look at how they gaze at each other!)
Into this too hard.
Maybe I need to draw art of these two again…
I love all forms of my OTP there is no wrong way to ship them.
Something else has been bothering me as well, I've found that the price of all the materials I would need to make a high-quality fursuit with three different fur colors, realistic ram horns, and a mouth piece I make myself only adds up to about $200. Why do fursuit makers charge ten times that amount?
because they are trying to make a living.
If you divide the time they work hourly on actually putting the material together, it’s almost less than minimum wage.
This original post’s opinion is something I have unfortunately seen people repeat. The gyst of it is that OP believes suits are cheap to make, so suitmakers must be overcharging. Furthermore it suggests the conclusion that suitmakers are charging the prices we do because of greed. I thought I’d lay out a couple points to help people understand why professional suitmakers charge the prices we do.
So, let’s pretend that you want to make professional-quality fursuits for $200 each, in expenses.
1. If you are lucky you may be able to find the fabric and foam you need for $200 (though this is at the bare minimum spectrum of material costs). Now, how are you going to make each suit? In order to make professional-quality suits, you are going to need a few things.
You will need to own a heavy-duty sewing machine ($400+), airbrush ($100+), airbrush compressor ($100+), electric drill and correct bits for making eyes ($50+), professional-quality electric clippers ($100+), silicone moldmaking and resin kits ($25-50 per kit), titanium scissors and sharpener ($25+), new shoes for feetpaws ($20+), rubber matting for soles ($20+), electric carving knife for thick foam ($25+); this is indicative of the tools used to create a typical fullsuit, but many suitmakers use other tools that also add to the expense (like dremels, vacuum-form tables, etc.).
You will also need to take into account your thread, needles, pins, polyfil, airbrush paints, lacquer, gluesticks, garbage bags, adhesives, sharpies/chalk, razorblades, zippers, eye plastic, buckram, machine oil, elastic, sandpaper, resin, and patternmaking material, which I won’t calculate here. You will eat through hundreds of these necessities every few weeks. And if you want a website, you must pay annually for your url and monthly for your website server.
So, a modest estimate for tools alone comes to roughly $900 NOT including any of the things that actually go into the tools to make them useful, which you will need to restock regularly.
2. It would be fair to want to be compensated for your specialized labor. A professional-grade fullsuit should take you about 2 weeks of work. The average professional suitmaker produces 2-3 suits a month. Suitmaking of course is a very specific set of artistic skills that takes years to develop, and only a handful of individuals in the world can make suits professionally. So, if it hypothetically only costs you $200 per suit for materials, how much do you charge for labor? At minimum wage ($8.50/hr), 80 hours of work (2 weeks full-time) will come to $680.This means if a suitmaker’s material costs are $200, and they are paid minimum wage, they will on average be left with $480 for every 2 weeks of full-time work. This comes to $960 a month. This is barely enough to pay electricity, water, food, and rent, let alone cover the restocking of basic materials. Unfortunately you *probably won’t* want to go out and get a second job if you are making suits professionally, because you already work 40 hours a week.
3. You must pay taxes on the suits you sell. That’s right, self-employed people like fursuit-makers in the United States have to pay self-employment tax (15.3% in 2014) AND income tax (another 15%). That means if you make that $960 a month, you must pay almost $2000 a year in taxes.
Suitmakers like me charge what we do in order to compensate for the financial investment we participate in every month, in order to produce a high-quality, lasting piece of original wearable art for you. We spend dozens or even hundreds of hours on each costume, lovingly rendering it to match your design. We strive to make our customers happy with their costumes, not only because of how they look but because of how well they are made and will hold up over time. We do *not* get rich doing this. We dedicate our lives to this craft; it is our career.
Do you still think we charge too much?
I don’t make fursuits, but this here is one of the best explanations of all the things that people who take commissions have to consider. It applies to cosplay too.
It applies to all art, period. Stop thinking that when you ask for a commission, a “fair” price is the price for supplies (in this case, $200). First of all, that is not the cost of supplies, that is the cost for materials, there’s still – as the response says – things like the sewing machine, spray paint, ect. Sewing machines don’t last forever, they require maintenance. Paint needs to be replenished. Things like that. So it’s actually much more than $200, as this person said.
Then there’s the time to make the actual product. That takes a lot of time, and effort.
Think of it like this. When you work your job, if someone comes up to you like, “I don’t understand why you get paid this, all you do is this,” don’t you get upset? You don’t “just” do something. You have a skill, a talent, something you’ve worked to get good at. And you want to be paid for that thing you do in a way that you can not only feel good about it, but live off of. Costume makers have to eat, pay bills, have a roof over their head, I think people forget that. They can’t make the costume if they can’t afford to pay for necessities, not just for the costume (like the sewing machine and stuff), but for themselves (food, shelter, ect.)
Thank you so much for your beautiful, inspiring commentary on my interview with LittleKuriboh. It means a lot. <3
Oh! You’re welcome :) Thanks for doing the interview! I really love Martin, lol, we’ve become friends over the years and I actually had no idea that depression was an issue for him, and I figured if he’s brave enough to come out and say it, I can too.
Honestly I’ve been wanting to make a post about it since it’s been a topic lately, and like I said, even if I know its something that runs in my family and my mom is open about it part of me is still like, “Eh…” because it’s looked at so negatively sometimes, like its something you can just turn on and off and be fine, but it doesn’t work like that. It just happens so randomly and sometimes you can’t explain it, even if you want to, and the response isn’t always so great, you know? Some people think they can just be like, “Stop,” and that’s all it takes, but when that cloud happens it ain’t movin’ for a while and it sucks.
It sucks because, if you’re like me, you’re telling yourself, “Get up, move, do something,” and when you don’t you just feel even worse, like, “Ugh I suck I can’t even get up,” and you start feeling guilty (I especially feel guilty because I actually work from home so if I get in this funk and get nothing done I feel really lousy). Then I’d feel bad for admitting it, like, “I’m depressed,” because people take it so lightly, but I’ve seen how heavy it can get, not just from my own experience but from my mother, who I guess has had therapy as a child, and has been in the hospital a few times, and on medication, and it really took that punch to the gut of my brother passing away for her to be like, “Nope. THIS is the worst thing I can go through, and if I can make it through that, I can make it through anything.” And, in a way, that helps me, too. If something really devastating happens (for example, in college, I lost my scholarship) she’ll be like, “It’s o.k., just cry it’s o.k., but you know what you know we’ve been through worse, we’ll get through this, too.” And it works.
But it shouldn’t reach that point with people, you should definitely talk to someone, which I do and my mom does, we talk to each other a lot. Because, sure, there’s that whole “we’ve been through worse” mentality, but that doesn’t mean whatever is getting you down isn’t upsetting. I mean hell, my brother being gone IS something that gets us down, I mean, his birthday is coming up and like clockwork we’ll both feel like shit, so we just talk, go about our day, she may watch movies and I may go to the zoo with my partner, whatever it takes.
when boys have sleepovers do they sleep in the same bed like girls do or do the rules of no homo include sharing beds
girls always share beds. and covers and clothes and food and personal space. sometimes even bathrooms
OMG! So back when my partner and I started dating, she came to visit me at my dad’s house. At one point she rested her head in my lap, or something, and my dad called my mom freaking out because “omg I think she’s gay.” (at this point he doesn’t care but at the time he did).
What’s funny is that, like, my best friend in high school, before I started dating my partner, before I even knew I liked girls? OMG we would LAY ALL OVER EACH OTHER! Like we shared the same bed for sleepovers and laid all over each other and like I would just walk into her house when I visited and just have dinner and stay the night and cuddle and stuff, like, you’d think we were dating or something. I mean sure she was 100% straight and still is and all that but, man, I still find it funny.
