I accidentally posted this in the NaNo thread earlier. I'll go ahead and copy it here, so if there any replies, they can go in the right spot.
Does anyone have any experience hiring an illustrator that can produce a professional-quality illustration for a book cover? (Whether the work included the actual cover or just the illustration?)
I've looked at a dozen pre-made cover sites, and some of them are pretty good in certain genres (like romance), but I've seen virtually no pre-mades that are good for high fantasy, and for the few that exist, they don't match my story at all. When a site sells pre-mades for fantasy, it's mostly only urban fantasy.
When looking at custom covers instead, the pricing is always for using stock images, and I'm not sure that's going to work for fantasy, either. And the decent designers charge $500 or more just for a good-looking custom cover made from stock images, without including any custom illustration.
I'm trying to figure out if there's any way a (good) custom illustration could fall within my budget. All the artists I find myself liking on artstation tend to either work for real companies or do freelance work for real companies, so I've been too nervous to ask them what their prices are.