EXPOSED
This title bundles two very different economics. The illustration tier — concept art, spot illustration, book covers, storyboards, editorial images, stock-style commercial work — is where generative image models already produce usable output at near-zero marginal cost, and commissioned rates have already compressed. The painting and sculpture tier survives on different grounds entirely: the object is physical, hand-made, signed, and its value is tied to a named human's authorship, exhibition record, and relationship with collectors and galleries — something a diffusion model structurally cannot supply.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 8 reflects that the brief-to-thumbnail-to-revision loop that pays most illustrators — spot art, cover comps, storyboards, background plates, character variations on a style sheet — is exactly the prompt-and-iterate workflow diffusion models now do in minutes, while the welding, stone carving, oil glazing and installation end of the title stays undigitisable, so the average sits below the mixed midpoint rather than at it.
Some physical or field component. A 12 is the average of a sculptor hauling armatures, running a kiln or torch, and installing site-specific work in unpredictable spaces, and an illustrator who works entirely in Photoshop or Procreate on a tablet — the physical tier is genuinely 16-plus, the digital tier near 2.
No licence, no signature requirement. A 1 is because nothing in this work requires a licence, a board, or a stamp: anyone can sell a painting or take an illustration commission, and the only legal apparatus around it is copyright and a contract, which protects the buyer's use rather than gatekeeping who may practise.
The human relationship is the product. A 14 recognises that gallery representation, collector relationships, provenance and a named exhibition record are literally what the object's price is made of at the fine-art end — but it stops short of 18 because a large share of illustration income arrives through art directors, agencies and marketplaces where the next comparable style is one search away.
Meaningful discretion. An 8 covers real authorial discretion — composition, subject, what a commission ultimately looks like — but the consequence of a wrong call is a rejected piece or an unsold canvas, not the safety, money or legal exposure of a third party, which is what separates this from the 14-plus band.
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