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Commission Etiquette Part Deux
15 years ago
General
The last time I wrote this was way over a year ago (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/939232/), and it seemed to go over well, so I think it's about time to make an update to the list. Possibly sort it out better, because going over it again I notice there were some things I left out and others I did not explain fully; perhaps I can do better this time.
This list is about how to describe what you want in a commission. Usually, about 80% of people are okay in this regard, though usually because you say "he is like this, here is a picture, do what you want". But, some people do not have this luxury, or don't seem to quite get it.
Contacting the Artist
1. Contact the artist by the manner in which he requests. Does he have a lot of rules, like a form to fill out? Too bad! If you want your picture in a timely manner it's just best to let the artist follow his own organization path. We're unorganized enough as it is, please don't contribute to it.
2. ALWAYS INCLUDE YOUR NAME. Naturally, if you're contacting over PMs, this is NOT necessary unless the artist asks for you to also include your name in the body of the note, but that's only because your name is already stuck to the subject line. This is not the case with email or IMs: we have no idea who you are until you say so. YOU HAVE GOT TO SAY SO.
Do I need a picture reference?
3. For characters, picture references help. A lot. They are preferable to text descriptions in most cases. Also: email allows attachments! Though it's generally a good idea to make your references web-resolution and not super large, because those are awkward to handle, like refrigerators. It takes less time to upload web-resolution pictures, too! Or, just link to it.
4. For poses, I would generally not bother. Even if you want a specific pose, it seems from what I heard that it's hit-or-miss whether the artist will actually follow it to the detail. Even then, you're usually not adding much, especially if you describe the pose while pointing to it, i.e. "Hand on hip, like in this picture!" Uh, there's really only so many ways that a hand goes on a hip, and if you don't want me thinking I'm tethered to a specific angle, leave the picture out.
5. If the pose is complex, the picture reference MIGHT help, especially if you're not good with words, or the description would end up being garbled. But in these cases, there's usually two issues:
First, that the pose would have to generally fall under the artist's umbra if you wanted a snowball's chance of it even coming out remotely right, in which case the artist would probably be better at composing the picture without the angle/spacing/photographic weirdness.
Second, if it doesn't fall under the artist's umbra, you will probably not get what you expected anyhow. It might be a better choice to fit your commission to the artists' skills. (Though I know many like a good challenge, just make sure they're up for it first)
In any case, most artists who can do complex poses can usually do so because they already know where to get references.
6. For clothing items and accessories, you really have two choices. You can give a picture reference, in which case, you need to give a reference that has the significant detail of the item in question. That means that, if you want a gun, the best bet is to give a picture of the gun's profile (side view), not an angle, because the profile contains 90% of the relevant information. And being able to see the handle is usually a good thing too.
Or, you can just say what it is, specifically. The specific name of the item in question will usually come up on a google image search. If you're in doubt, however, look yourself, but if you can say the name of the item in a single noun phrase, you don't really need to include a picture reference.
If you cannot say the name of the item in a single noun phrase, like with complex dresses or custom devices or what have you, you either have something in mind or you want the artist to design it for you. I know almost nothing about dress design, so if you're going to drop a LOT of terms on me, I might actually need a crash course, so see text descriptions below.
So, what pictures do I include?
7. For any given reference you may want to include, please make sure it is relevant. I have at least twice been given a random picture that perhaps had ONE detail for the pose that the commissioner wanted, which could be described in one word or less. If the picture contains maybe half a line's worth of detail, it is completely unnecessary.
8. You need one, maybe two, pictures of your character. Which pictures? Well, if the commission is in color, you would do well to include one in color that has the colors closest to your character's basic color scheme. If the commission is in black and white, you do not need a color reference but it certainly does not hurt. If the commission is not going to include the character's nudie bits, for the love of Peter Jackson you don't need to show off, because it doesn't impress me.
If you only have adult references, you have got to ask if it's okay for the artist who doesn't do that thing. For one, the artist may easily be underage, and you don't want the internet police at your door. For two, even though artists are usually jaded toward that sort of thing, they may not appreciate the random porn links or attachments in their email. It might be hot to you, but to many people it's self-aggrandizing or just plain annoying. I normally have my mature filter turned on because my inbox would be depressing otherwise, so linking me to an FA picture marked mature means I have to go through a few more steps to see it.
I'm pretty much okay if the picture has the parts showing (nothing I haven't seen before and all), but again, if you only have adult references, please make them the least messy ones. I might be looking at this several times over the course of drawing, and it will probably not do to have me giggling at you the entire time.
9. If the picture is incorrect, please elaborate on what part of it needs to be changed UPFRONT and not buried in the middle of a paragraph. Do not leave it to suss out for ourselves; we do need to know these things.
If the picture is VERY incorrect, it may be best to either leave it out altogether or just say what part of the picture you DO want. If this would be better described by a different, more accurate picture, just use the other picture. And even then, a text description is going to be better than the bits-and-pieces of several incorrect and misleading pictures.
10. Usually, if I am not used to whatever species or what have you that you will have me draw, then the style of the picture reference is often important. If I do not know how to draw a pygmy marmoset, your picture references will be very helpful (your own take on google image search less so). But I may end up doing a lot of copying and eyeballing from the specific picture you've given me, which may not look a thing like my own normal style. If none of the pictures you give me look anything like my usual style, I might assume that you're expecting something more like this.
But just be clear what you want if you only have one style of picture references: Did you actually want toony? Toony is not my default, so be sure to say upfront if that IS what you want.
Okay, so what do I put in the text?
11. If you don't have any pictures, that is fine! Everyone needs to start somewhere, so if you only have text descriptions, that's okay. Though if you do have a picture reference, PLEASE use that. If you have a gallery full of them that I know about, I'm going to look at those anyway, so you might as well make my job easier.
12. Ideally, keep your description to the relevant details. If it's a bust portrait, I don't really need to know anything about your character that is not the bust, so you're wasting everyone's time if you're talking in excruciating detail about his feet because you're normally a paw person and that is part of your standard description text. If the picture is in black-and-white, I don't really need to know the colors, though depending on the kind of black and white I might need to know where they are so I know what gets shaded.
13. DO NOT START YOUR DESCRIPTION WITH THE DETAILS. The ideal description would be brief, and go from the general to the specific. If the following is not implicitly understood, you MUST make it known: what species the character is, what gender, if they are anthro or quad, their general body shape, their general disposition, their general color scheme, etc.
What I mean by implicitly understood is this: if you simply say your character is a tiger, since I am an anthro artist I am going to assume you mean he is an anthro tiger of a normal orange-black-and-white color palette probably somewhere in his mid-twenties, and he totally has a tail about the size I usually draw them and stands digitigrade. Being a tiger he will probably be big and lithe and probably pretty muscular, he is going to be male, and be tough guy with a show-offish sexy streak (because we're anthro artists. It is usually a safe assumption). If your character is not any of those things, I will definitely need to know it, immediately after you tell me he is a tiger (though some things, like disposition, can easily go in their own section).
If you instead begin your character description with something like "he has cat ears . . ." this is a Bad Thing. That is a detail. I will begin by assuming your character is not a cat but has cat ears, because you specifically avoided calling him a cat. But knowing what your character is not does not help me; I cannot fill in details of the character by picturing what he is not. The general description helps a lot because that means I can fill in all the details you don't include instead of having to play connect-the-dots between the ones you do.
To put it briefly, DO NOT GIVE ME YOUR FURCADIA DESCRIPTION
Some artists are not as up on animal anatomy as others. For less skilled artists, it's usually good to remind them that raccoons are plantigrade and have noses that do not look canine.
14. After you have given a brief general overview, list unusual details in order of prominence. I use unusual in the most basic sense: these details should only be necessary ones. For instance, if your tiger has a tiger face, and you're totally okay with the way I do tiger faces, you do not need to say much about the face. If you have a picture reference that is essentially correct in this department, then details about the face do not need to factor in.
NUMBERS ARE NOT DESCRIPTIVE unless you are actually counting something, like tentacles or fingers. Describing bust size in terms of a number does not mean much of anything, for instance.
If your character has, for instance, hair of some kind, this is unusual for an anthro, especially if you don't usually see the artist draw them with hair. I will usually need to know specifics about this, but again this only has to be brief, like "short brown hair". This is one thing that a picture reference might help a lot with, or it might be totally superfluous, depending on how important it is.
Eye color is usually a good thing to point out when you have a color commission, because sometimes it doesn't end up showing on some commissions.
15. Your character's color scheme (or other scheme) may be rather specific; you might want something to follow a simplified pattern instead of going the natural-looking route, or whatever the artist usually does. This might take a while if you have to describe it, but in order to describe this right, you have to understand what order these details go.
Remember, if you're not worried about being specific, you don't need to go into this much detail.
Like above, do not start with details, like what color his neck is. Start by saying if this is at all like what his species' normal color scheme is. Then start your description from either the torso or the face. Usually this goes better if you describe a base coat color (the base coat color is usually the one that covers most of the back/head), and then describe all the other colors one at a time.
Describe the colors and patterns as a continuous range. This means that you do not describe the belly as cream-white, and then later describe the inner thigh as cream-white, because that will confuse me into thinking you might intend them as being separated spots of color instead of continuous.
So when you are describing the cream-white belly, tell me at what points it stops. The top of the chest? front of the neck, under the chin? Does it wrap around the neck? Does it go up to the muzzle? How much of the muzzle is covered and where?
DO NOT DO THIS: Do not describe your character's colors in terms of hexadecimal numbers. Yes I can punch it into photoshop, but not everyone HAS photoshop, and color is often subjective. Do you really want to be tied down to your own judgement of color rather than an artist's? If you do need specific colors, you might feel like you need to point to certain hexadecimal numbers, but it really, really might look worse than you expect.
16. For scenario descriptions, do not go against the spirit of the guidelines. If this is a single-character picture, do not try to wedge in any sort of complex scenery unless the artist says it's okay. Also, a box is usually not complex. A motorcycle is.
17. Make sure the pose you describe is physically possible. I cannot reasonably show off the chest AND the butt at the same time, so if you have something in mind that sounds awkward, you may need to prove it can be done first. If so, don't make this proof an awkwardly-drawn picture by an artist that crammed it in because he also wanted to show off the chest and butt at the same time and in doing so broke all laws of proportion and anatomy.
18. Please trust the judgement of the artist when it comes to composition. Having your own scenario and specific poses is fine and all, but you really ought to not tell an artist how to do his job if you are not one. This means that you should not do things like tell the artist precisely how the foot should be extended so help me Santa if it's not right. Or that these two contradictory things need to be present. Or that you should have these characters standing in a boring arrangement instead of a dynamic one. If the artist CAN make something better than your imagination, it is generally a good idea to let them.
19. If you want the artist to focus on something, anything, TELL THEM BEFORE THEY DO THE SKETCH. If you really wanted the artist to show off Renamon's chest but told the artist they could do whatever, you pretty much ought to have told them that instead of dancing around it and then only bringing it up when the sketch ended up with her crossing her chest with her arms. Or, if you want to make sure the artist shows off her chest, and in doing so describe a terrible, terrible pose with the intention of the artist doing this RIGHT, it will often end up terribly awkward. Show off her feet AND her chest? Doable. But only if I know that I'm supposed to do this before the sketch is done.
20. If you want your picture to look similar to something, how about you say "I want this style, like you did in these two pictures". That is very helpful to know if it's not already assumed that the artist will do this. Even if the artists gives examples of what his commissions will look like, sometimes it is a good idea to point to precisely which one in particular you have in mind.
21. If you're leaving the whole picture up to the artist, you're basically asking them to do the following: make it sort of like the picture references you gave, keep all extraneous details to a minimum, and if there is no setting hinted at, make it contemporary-ish, and use whatever disposition I feel is right for this character's species or whatever he usually looks like in the references. If you want something other than that, then you will have to tell the artist.
So what do I do after I have all that done?
22. Pay promptly. Some artists prefer to have the payment come only after they're done, and some prefer it upfront. In any case, DO NOT WHINE ABOUT IT. Unless you have ACTUALLY been stiffed by this artist, you do not have any grounds to complain about their policy or the fact that you are giving up money for services rendered. If you have been stiffed, then you get to complain. "Overpaying" is not being stiffed; you agree to the price upfront, and you get what you pay for.
23. If some detail is wrong with the sketch, TELL THE ARTIST IMMEDIATELY. It is YOUR FAULT IF YOU DO NOT, because the artist is neither a psychic nor perfect. Don't be sarcastic about anything, don't try to dance around it. Tell me directly, in no uncertain terms what I missed.
24. If the detail was not in your description, this may make the artist grumpy, but they might not show it. The bigger the detail you missed, the grumpier the artist. If the detail is big enough, that means that the entire picture, or at least a large chunk of it, will probably need to be scrapped (If you don't apologize profusely, to the artist this usually looks like you're saying "ha ha, he's supposed to be clothed, what are you an idiot?" Don't implicitly call the artist an idiot.)
25. If the commission is only a sketch, it's usually pretty okay if you have some minor details changed. If you're asking for the whole picture to be redrawn based on some detail that was not in your description, you are essentially relying on the artist's good graces to give you another picture for free, if they don't just fudge it and say "take this awkward pose because you made me draw the foot facing forward instead" Asking for a sketch to be redrawn at a convention is usually not kosher.
26. If the artist wants to redo the picture anyway, let him. If he is not happy with the sketch he will not be happy with the linework or the color work and the picture will suffer as a result.
Okay, I think I got everything out of my system this time and hope I wasn't overly wordy. If there's anything I missed, you can mention it here.
This list is about how to describe what you want in a commission. Usually, about 80% of people are okay in this regard, though usually because you say "he is like this, here is a picture, do what you want". But, some people do not have this luxury, or don't seem to quite get it.
Contacting the Artist
1. Contact the artist by the manner in which he requests. Does he have a lot of rules, like a form to fill out? Too bad! If you want your picture in a timely manner it's just best to let the artist follow his own organization path. We're unorganized enough as it is, please don't contribute to it.
2. ALWAYS INCLUDE YOUR NAME. Naturally, if you're contacting over PMs, this is NOT necessary unless the artist asks for you to also include your name in the body of the note, but that's only because your name is already stuck to the subject line. This is not the case with email or IMs: we have no idea who you are until you say so. YOU HAVE GOT TO SAY SO.
Do I need a picture reference?
3. For characters, picture references help. A lot. They are preferable to text descriptions in most cases. Also: email allows attachments! Though it's generally a good idea to make your references web-resolution and not super large, because those are awkward to handle, like refrigerators. It takes less time to upload web-resolution pictures, too! Or, just link to it.
4. For poses, I would generally not bother. Even if you want a specific pose, it seems from what I heard that it's hit-or-miss whether the artist will actually follow it to the detail. Even then, you're usually not adding much, especially if you describe the pose while pointing to it, i.e. "Hand on hip, like in this picture!" Uh, there's really only so many ways that a hand goes on a hip, and if you don't want me thinking I'm tethered to a specific angle, leave the picture out.
5. If the pose is complex, the picture reference MIGHT help, especially if you're not good with words, or the description would end up being garbled. But in these cases, there's usually two issues:
First, that the pose would have to generally fall under the artist's umbra if you wanted a snowball's chance of it even coming out remotely right, in which case the artist would probably be better at composing the picture without the angle/spacing/photographic weirdness.
Second, if it doesn't fall under the artist's umbra, you will probably not get what you expected anyhow. It might be a better choice to fit your commission to the artists' skills. (Though I know many like a good challenge, just make sure they're up for it first)
In any case, most artists who can do complex poses can usually do so because they already know where to get references.
6. For clothing items and accessories, you really have two choices. You can give a picture reference, in which case, you need to give a reference that has the significant detail of the item in question. That means that, if you want a gun, the best bet is to give a picture of the gun's profile (side view), not an angle, because the profile contains 90% of the relevant information. And being able to see the handle is usually a good thing too.
Or, you can just say what it is, specifically. The specific name of the item in question will usually come up on a google image search. If you're in doubt, however, look yourself, but if you can say the name of the item in a single noun phrase, you don't really need to include a picture reference.
If you cannot say the name of the item in a single noun phrase, like with complex dresses or custom devices or what have you, you either have something in mind or you want the artist to design it for you. I know almost nothing about dress design, so if you're going to drop a LOT of terms on me, I might actually need a crash course, so see text descriptions below.
So, what pictures do I include?
7. For any given reference you may want to include, please make sure it is relevant. I have at least twice been given a random picture that perhaps had ONE detail for the pose that the commissioner wanted, which could be described in one word or less. If the picture contains maybe half a line's worth of detail, it is completely unnecessary.
8. You need one, maybe two, pictures of your character. Which pictures? Well, if the commission is in color, you would do well to include one in color that has the colors closest to your character's basic color scheme. If the commission is in black and white, you do not need a color reference but it certainly does not hurt. If the commission is not going to include the character's nudie bits, for the love of Peter Jackson you don't need to show off, because it doesn't impress me.
If you only have adult references, you have got to ask if it's okay for the artist who doesn't do that thing. For one, the artist may easily be underage, and you don't want the internet police at your door. For two, even though artists are usually jaded toward that sort of thing, they may not appreciate the random porn links or attachments in their email. It might be hot to you, but to many people it's self-aggrandizing or just plain annoying. I normally have my mature filter turned on because my inbox would be depressing otherwise, so linking me to an FA picture marked mature means I have to go through a few more steps to see it.
I'm pretty much okay if the picture has the parts showing (nothing I haven't seen before and all), but again, if you only have adult references, please make them the least messy ones. I might be looking at this several times over the course of drawing, and it will probably not do to have me giggling at you the entire time.
9. If the picture is incorrect, please elaborate on what part of it needs to be changed UPFRONT and not buried in the middle of a paragraph. Do not leave it to suss out for ourselves; we do need to know these things.
If the picture is VERY incorrect, it may be best to either leave it out altogether or just say what part of the picture you DO want. If this would be better described by a different, more accurate picture, just use the other picture. And even then, a text description is going to be better than the bits-and-pieces of several incorrect and misleading pictures.
10. Usually, if I am not used to whatever species or what have you that you will have me draw, then the style of the picture reference is often important. If I do not know how to draw a pygmy marmoset, your picture references will be very helpful (your own take on google image search less so). But I may end up doing a lot of copying and eyeballing from the specific picture you've given me, which may not look a thing like my own normal style. If none of the pictures you give me look anything like my usual style, I might assume that you're expecting something more like this.
But just be clear what you want if you only have one style of picture references: Did you actually want toony? Toony is not my default, so be sure to say upfront if that IS what you want.
Okay, so what do I put in the text?
11. If you don't have any pictures, that is fine! Everyone needs to start somewhere, so if you only have text descriptions, that's okay. Though if you do have a picture reference, PLEASE use that. If you have a gallery full of them that I know about, I'm going to look at those anyway, so you might as well make my job easier.
12. Ideally, keep your description to the relevant details. If it's a bust portrait, I don't really need to know anything about your character that is not the bust, so you're wasting everyone's time if you're talking in excruciating detail about his feet because you're normally a paw person and that is part of your standard description text. If the picture is in black-and-white, I don't really need to know the colors, though depending on the kind of black and white I might need to know where they are so I know what gets shaded.
13. DO NOT START YOUR DESCRIPTION WITH THE DETAILS. The ideal description would be brief, and go from the general to the specific. If the following is not implicitly understood, you MUST make it known: what species the character is, what gender, if they are anthro or quad, their general body shape, their general disposition, their general color scheme, etc.
What I mean by implicitly understood is this: if you simply say your character is a tiger, since I am an anthro artist I am going to assume you mean he is an anthro tiger of a normal orange-black-and-white color palette probably somewhere in his mid-twenties, and he totally has a tail about the size I usually draw them and stands digitigrade. Being a tiger he will probably be big and lithe and probably pretty muscular, he is going to be male, and be tough guy with a show-offish sexy streak (because we're anthro artists. It is usually a safe assumption). If your character is not any of those things, I will definitely need to know it, immediately after you tell me he is a tiger (though some things, like disposition, can easily go in their own section).
If you instead begin your character description with something like "he has cat ears . . ." this is a Bad Thing. That is a detail. I will begin by assuming your character is not a cat but has cat ears, because you specifically avoided calling him a cat. But knowing what your character is not does not help me; I cannot fill in details of the character by picturing what he is not. The general description helps a lot because that means I can fill in all the details you don't include instead of having to play connect-the-dots between the ones you do.
To put it briefly, DO NOT GIVE ME YOUR FURCADIA DESCRIPTION
Some artists are not as up on animal anatomy as others. For less skilled artists, it's usually good to remind them that raccoons are plantigrade and have noses that do not look canine.
14. After you have given a brief general overview, list unusual details in order of prominence. I use unusual in the most basic sense: these details should only be necessary ones. For instance, if your tiger has a tiger face, and you're totally okay with the way I do tiger faces, you do not need to say much about the face. If you have a picture reference that is essentially correct in this department, then details about the face do not need to factor in.
NUMBERS ARE NOT DESCRIPTIVE unless you are actually counting something, like tentacles or fingers. Describing bust size in terms of a number does not mean much of anything, for instance.
If your character has, for instance, hair of some kind, this is unusual for an anthro, especially if you don't usually see the artist draw them with hair. I will usually need to know specifics about this, but again this only has to be brief, like "short brown hair". This is one thing that a picture reference might help a lot with, or it might be totally superfluous, depending on how important it is.
Eye color is usually a good thing to point out when you have a color commission, because sometimes it doesn't end up showing on some commissions.
15. Your character's color scheme (or other scheme) may be rather specific; you might want something to follow a simplified pattern instead of going the natural-looking route, or whatever the artist usually does. This might take a while if you have to describe it, but in order to describe this right, you have to understand what order these details go.
Remember, if you're not worried about being specific, you don't need to go into this much detail.
Like above, do not start with details, like what color his neck is. Start by saying if this is at all like what his species' normal color scheme is. Then start your description from either the torso or the face. Usually this goes better if you describe a base coat color (the base coat color is usually the one that covers most of the back/head), and then describe all the other colors one at a time.
Describe the colors and patterns as a continuous range. This means that you do not describe the belly as cream-white, and then later describe the inner thigh as cream-white, because that will confuse me into thinking you might intend them as being separated spots of color instead of continuous.
So when you are describing the cream-white belly, tell me at what points it stops. The top of the chest? front of the neck, under the chin? Does it wrap around the neck? Does it go up to the muzzle? How much of the muzzle is covered and where?
DO NOT DO THIS: Do not describe your character's colors in terms of hexadecimal numbers. Yes I can punch it into photoshop, but not everyone HAS photoshop, and color is often subjective. Do you really want to be tied down to your own judgement of color rather than an artist's? If you do need specific colors, you might feel like you need to point to certain hexadecimal numbers, but it really, really might look worse than you expect.
16. For scenario descriptions, do not go against the spirit of the guidelines. If this is a single-character picture, do not try to wedge in any sort of complex scenery unless the artist says it's okay. Also, a box is usually not complex. A motorcycle is.
17. Make sure the pose you describe is physically possible. I cannot reasonably show off the chest AND the butt at the same time, so if you have something in mind that sounds awkward, you may need to prove it can be done first. If so, don't make this proof an awkwardly-drawn picture by an artist that crammed it in because he also wanted to show off the chest and butt at the same time and in doing so broke all laws of proportion and anatomy.
18. Please trust the judgement of the artist when it comes to composition. Having your own scenario and specific poses is fine and all, but you really ought to not tell an artist how to do his job if you are not one. This means that you should not do things like tell the artist precisely how the foot should be extended so help me Santa if it's not right. Or that these two contradictory things need to be present. Or that you should have these characters standing in a boring arrangement instead of a dynamic one. If the artist CAN make something better than your imagination, it is generally a good idea to let them.
19. If you want the artist to focus on something, anything, TELL THEM BEFORE THEY DO THE SKETCH. If you really wanted the artist to show off Renamon's chest but told the artist they could do whatever, you pretty much ought to have told them that instead of dancing around it and then only bringing it up when the sketch ended up with her crossing her chest with her arms. Or, if you want to make sure the artist shows off her chest, and in doing so describe a terrible, terrible pose with the intention of the artist doing this RIGHT, it will often end up terribly awkward. Show off her feet AND her chest? Doable. But only if I know that I'm supposed to do this before the sketch is done.
20. If you want your picture to look similar to something, how about you say "I want this style, like you did in these two pictures". That is very helpful to know if it's not already assumed that the artist will do this. Even if the artists gives examples of what his commissions will look like, sometimes it is a good idea to point to precisely which one in particular you have in mind.
21. If you're leaving the whole picture up to the artist, you're basically asking them to do the following: make it sort of like the picture references you gave, keep all extraneous details to a minimum, and if there is no setting hinted at, make it contemporary-ish, and use whatever disposition I feel is right for this character's species or whatever he usually looks like in the references. If you want something other than that, then you will have to tell the artist.
So what do I do after I have all that done?
22. Pay promptly. Some artists prefer to have the payment come only after they're done, and some prefer it upfront. In any case, DO NOT WHINE ABOUT IT. Unless you have ACTUALLY been stiffed by this artist, you do not have any grounds to complain about their policy or the fact that you are giving up money for services rendered. If you have been stiffed, then you get to complain. "Overpaying" is not being stiffed; you agree to the price upfront, and you get what you pay for.
23. If some detail is wrong with the sketch, TELL THE ARTIST IMMEDIATELY. It is YOUR FAULT IF YOU DO NOT, because the artist is neither a psychic nor perfect. Don't be sarcastic about anything, don't try to dance around it. Tell me directly, in no uncertain terms what I missed.
24. If the detail was not in your description, this may make the artist grumpy, but they might not show it. The bigger the detail you missed, the grumpier the artist. If the detail is big enough, that means that the entire picture, or at least a large chunk of it, will probably need to be scrapped (If you don't apologize profusely, to the artist this usually looks like you're saying "ha ha, he's supposed to be clothed, what are you an idiot?" Don't implicitly call the artist an idiot.)
25. If the commission is only a sketch, it's usually pretty okay if you have some minor details changed. If you're asking for the whole picture to be redrawn based on some detail that was not in your description, you are essentially relying on the artist's good graces to give you another picture for free, if they don't just fudge it and say "take this awkward pose because you made me draw the foot facing forward instead" Asking for a sketch to be redrawn at a convention is usually not kosher.
26. If the artist wants to redo the picture anyway, let him. If he is not happy with the sketch he will not be happy with the linework or the color work and the picture will suffer as a result.
Okay, I think I got everything out of my system this time and hope I wasn't overly wordy. If there's anything I missed, you can mention it here.
I didn't like because I found there wasn't much space to write. You had to be simple and give only a bit of information. Using online forms and websites to put TOS works a lot better.
I think I love you.
I used to not have it, and sai doesn't use those colors. Even when googling, I'd have to eyeball the colors cause I could only find generators.
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/924810/
I would love to giggle at that picture.
Anyhoo... there is one thing that I'm never really sure on. O.o That being the issue of letting the artist do whatever they want with the pic. I've heard both sides of it, some like having the creative freedom to do whatever they want, but others don't like the idea of having extra work to do for the pic. Personally, I give 'em the option to do as they wish or give 'em a basic idea to follow on, unless I have a specific thought-out idea I really want to see. o.o
It also sometimes depends on how the artist perceives the commissioner; if they're explicitly strict (down to arranging the composition of the picture rather than just saying what pose) and don't say that the artist has much leeway with interpretation, then the artist often gets stuck because the commissioner left out certain details--not that he can't make them up himself, but because the commissioner was so detailed, it seems like the sort of thing he'd mind about.
Also, I don't have any pornographic references, but I'm pretty sure you giggle at me anyway.
I'd like to see this published or something, but probably in a more condensed form or something that gets the main bullet points out better with minor details underlying. Other than that, I have probably suffered from at least one of everyone one of those problems. And sadly from only two people. Never really get any commissioners, and when I do, they are usually unbearable for the most part.