I invite everybody to read this amazing journal here: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2642305/ also, check out his art, he's really really good :)

ON PIRACY
First of all, i like pirates. They are art consumers, and i base my living on the concept of people consuming art. They aren't thieves, nor bad people, they are customers who don't want to BUY A COPY. This is key. They do like you, as an artist, they do like your product, as a furry comic, they do want to read it, but they want you to stop trying to sell copies.

Selling art without copies isn't an intuitive concept, but there are already ad-powered free newspapers, banners, selling easy access or simplified services (like what Steam or the App Store so for games), selling access to a forum and a community of people with similar interests, or even turning the whole business upside down and getting people to pay you to draw the comic in the first place (ala Kickstarter). Those are all ways to do business with people who do NOT want to buy a copy. In less than 30 years, this will be 100% of paying public for any kind of "popular" art, so: if a business model isn't preparing itself to be slowly converted to a 100% piracy environment… it's just time to think an escape plan. It's sad when a job disappears, but it happens all the time, the copy-seller artist will soon met his business ancestor: the copying and miniaturist monk of the thirteen century.


ON COMMISSIONS
Commissions are how art was supposed to work all along: a customer wants an art piece and offers food, and an artist wants to realize his craft but also eat: the compromise between the two contrasting forces is the basis of creativity and drove art pretty much for all its history: Michelangelo painted with a commissioner pope breathing behind his neck all the time, i don't think his art looks bad or boring. Conflict is to art what war is to technology; the cold war stopped: humanity never reached mars.

The concept of an artist without a customer, creating art "just because he loves it" is perhaps the biggest lie ever diffused by the "romantic" press that followed the rediscovery of impressionism, it had little to no basis on reality, the artist who paints for himself is the hobbits with a cellar full of unwanted paintings, the people actually cited on art books all had commissioners. Sometimes the customer isn't a person, but a whole subculture, which explains works of the likes of Robert Crumb, sometimes a bank in need to avoid too many taxes, sometimes the customer is the skilled salesman who can "use" those pictures, and resell them in a gallery, or sell lots of of copies to secondary customers, with prints, books, as ads or inside comics. Independence is the gift an artist gets gradually with fame, but i still have doubts Lucio Fontana continued to cut canvasses for all his life because he felt just “inspired” to do so.

The biggest problem with furry commissions is the lack of awareness of young artists to the concept of sustainability.
A lot of artist end up stuck in what i define as the over-delivery spiral: when they rise to "fame" they create pieces that require extreme care and time, they push their technique to the limit not caring for the effort needed, and, since Furry is like every other market and you have to see the prices around, they have to undersell it compared to the work it needed so that the market can absorb them, a sum which in furry fandom is sometimes truly a pittance. The final result is an... abusive relationship, where the people who love you are actually ripping you off, and you end up hating your customers.

I've touched working rates as low as 6$/hour, which is INSANE, and i know artists who fell under 4$/h, and even if some of the resulting works are among the best this fandom has to offer this is just pointless willing slavery. Especially if the commission is porn, which mean it will never ever escape the furry fandom or be justified as portfolio material.

Overworked art isn't even a Furry Fandom specific problem: i know a lot of guys who went to publishers with amazing portfolios, only to strike down contacts for tons of 30$ per illustration where talent is worth like used cat bedding, and being torn between survival and… continue being awesome. The most common rejection motivation i got the first time i showed my portfolio was a sad: "We can't afford this quality”, or “we can’t pay color stuff”.

Man up, and drop down quality. No, seriously, dropping quality is as much as a challenge as is pushing that realistic fur texture to the limit, except it's not going to make you go broke and shut down a gallery in a rage fit. I check the workability of my techniques all the times, and sometimes i just stop to get things to go faster. When people pay you 50$ you should work for 3 hours MAX, if you are doing more, there's something wrong with your offer and your technique. And never ever forget lateral possible gains, like building folios of your commissions (or making customer pay for exclusivity), using some real media from time to time, as digital art is completely worthless unless the quality is nothing short of amazing, and offering limited prints and signed stuff... the list is long.

Artist who can control quality and can give to the commissioner half baked stuff with a straight face are doing serious money on this website. They are better artists than the "i will draw every single hair of your character one by one, for 10 bucks" folks: they are thinking this as a job not an hobby. If i had an euro for every time i get a link to this or that "hack", making a ton of money from low quality art, i would get rich myself. My art, right now, is unsustainable to furry standards, i have lots of plans to make the situation less bad. Should i fail at that, i'll just drop from the commission business altogether. I don't think it's unprofitable, but i'm just unfit to mass production of backgroundless sketches.

Finally, other than lowering quality, start to be smarter with what you offer. A lot of rules of traditional art do not work on furry art and porn, look at who sells good, and steal their winning concepts.

ON COMICS
Full disclosure: i'm working on a furry comics right now, and finished preproduction on a second one. The distribution plans are pretty cloudy on both of them, the second one i will pirate myself, offering a pirate-tailored version for them to enjoy.

I really don’t like the idea of suggesting people to do comics: it’s an risky and front-loaded business which requires distribution infrastructure or over-reliance on people good will, and the risk of sitting over unsellable pages. Finally, as you must cater to a mass of fans, you’re going to draw mass-furry-marked chowder, which means comics have also a bigger potential for creativity-bankrupt. In fact, furry comics are almost ALREADY creatively bankrupt from my point of view, with almost copy-pasted plot in a different setting.

On top of all that, comics are hard. And i mean, HARD. Bad panel work, bad composition, bad character management, inconstant art, lack of storytelling skill, or just plain bad are pretty much the norm on every furry comic i’ve read with an handful of exceptions. What makes furry comics interesting now, is simply a matter of extremely thin production against enormous demand and the security that, even if everything is crap, there’s going to be some decent porn in it.

Finally: i know a lot of people who are actively pushed into piracy after getting ripped off from dull comics.

IN CONCLUSION:
Be realistic with your commission, really, drop the pretense furry fandom can sustain amazing full-page paintings, or think at least getting paid in 2 or 3 ways for every single commission you do. Use auctions to measure your actual value, focus on what your customer wants, and don’t work just for art’s sake. If you can do a decent “i’m a teen discovering i’m gay” comic, go for it, people’s gonna love it. If you want to make a different comic, think of a character, and build the comic over it, always focus on how to sell that character: this is how a successful comics in real world works.