Can you create artwork for me?

Yes, absolutely — with one important distinction up front.

The HeadBuilder gives you four ways to make artwork yourself: upload your own, search millions of stock images, build a crest with the ShieldGenerator, or describe what you want and let ImageAgent draw it. But if you'd rather hand it to a professional, we can help there too. Before you start jumping for joy, though, let's all get on the same page…

First, we need to clarify the difference between custom design and custom illustration. Custom design is your standard fare — layout, typesetting, drop shadows, colors, general presentation. Custom illustration, on the other hand, usually means hand-drawing, painting, or otherwise creating a work of art literally from scratch. In other words, commissioning a one-of-a-kind piece from a very talented (and usually expensive) artist.

DrumART employs some amazing designers, so we can and do both kinds of work all the time. In fact we provide some form of graphic design service on virtually every Leave It To Us head we produce. It's rare that a design comes in that can't benefit in some way from our experience. We generally do this at no charge as a courtesy — it's why you hire us, after all. We do charge for more in-depth design work, complicated vectorization and the like, but we're as reasonable as possible about it.

Custom illustration is where things get hazy. It is very, VERY time-consuming to draw something meaningfully good from words in an email. "I want a guy on a boat on a stormy sea, and I want it to look cool" doesn't actually mean very much. What kind of guy? What's he wearing? What color hair? What kind of boat? What's the perspective? Is it day? Night? Is there anything else in the water? What's the landscape? Is he even near land? What colors? You get the point. And even after creating something, there's no guarantee it'll be what you pictured. For these reasons and more, we do not offer custom illustration services. If your concept falls outside our standard design offerings, we'll tell you and point you toward resources that can help.