An issue I keep running into is that of the free sketch. In very good faith and with the best of intentions artists have offered me these time and time again. I do fully appreciate the offer, it is one of the most personal and kindest gifts artists can afford to give without offering some considerably larger or more elaborate increment(s) of art. Meanwhile anything more involved than a sketch would be unreasonable for them to offer for free as more involved arts cut much more heavily into their time, energy, and creative efforts all of which are their most precious resources and fundamental life blood. An artist offering anything more than a sketch for free would often be equivalent to an artist offering up one of their meals for the month or part of their rent check – many of them literally cannot afford such self-sacrificial leaps of generosity. I well and totally appreciate all this so I would never expect an artist to offer anything more than a free sketch, but at the same time that does not make me want a free sketch. Often I don’t need anything, just give me your gratitude with words if you must give anything at all, Often I don’t want your free sketch even though I fully appreciate what a generous personal offer this is.

I am aware this makes me an asshole – to refuse people’s heartfelt gifts on any grounds is a fundamentally asshole thing to do. It is true, and I accept this, I am an asshole for this reason as well as probably a number of others. That said below is why I may not want your free sketch in the off chance that anyone has read this far and still cares.

I have spent a tremendous amount on art in the furry community. Though it does not show, I have been spending on artists in the community since the 90s and to date have spent well into the five digits, it may even be more than half-way to six digits by now. For me to want art, no matter how little or how much it may cost (including zero), I need to have some sort of emotional and personal investment in it. This usually means said art needs to be connected to larger projects that I have personally invested in the vision for with time, effort, and emotion.

If an artist tells me “I am open please commission me” then before I can ask anything of them I need to seriously sit down, some times for rather significant stretches of time, work furiously on building the vision for a project, fuss with it, and obsess over it until I am emotionally attached to and personally invested in it enough that I actually want it to be brought to life by an artist. If I don’t do this whole stupid ritual as dumb as it is, then I don’t want the art, I don’t care how good or cheap it is. If I haven't done this I don’t care if it is free, I still don’t want it. If I haven’t invested myself properly into the vision behind a project that warrants your art, then your art is as desirable to me as the fliers that solicitors hound out on the street when you are just trying to mind your own business walking about town. Some people might like those, I guess its possible, but usually I work to try and avoid the solicitors and their fliers, and if I fail then I am usually looking for the first recycle bin or garbage can I can find.

Thus my issue with free sketches. For any piece of art however large or small I need to get myself personally and emotionally invested to care. While fletching out the structure and especially the details of larger projects obviously takes more time than for smaller projects, the whole stupid ritual I unfortunately need to do to get personally emotionally involved is about the same regardless of the size of the project. Thus the time, effort, energy, and emotional expenditure I need to muster is about the same to care about a sketch as some epic full-color comic. The joy I get from a single sketch, however, is considerably less. A single self-contained sketch thus is actually a net drain on me – I am left more exhausted than I will ever derive any interest or joy from that sketch. The sketch actually net emotionally costs me and is thus more of a burden than a gift. Its like giving someone an exotic pet they didn’t want or ask for; it may have been heartfelt, hard to obtain, even expensive, but if the receiver didn’t want or ask for it and it is high maintenance than there is a good chance it is not a gift but a burden.

“Why don’t you do the work now to create a project that can be composed out of many sketches so you can appreciate them when they are offered?”

This is a fantastic idea and I have been trying to work on that for some time now. As of this writing I have one open project to that effect that warrants about one sketch from any artist. As a result, if you have not already provided me with a sketch (free or paid) for this project you will find I am probably pretty enthusiastic to get a sketch from you (and more then happy to pay for one – doesn't need to be free) to integrate it into this project. After that sketch though, you will find that until I can come up with another sketch-consolidating project I have no interest in another sketch from you – I may have begged you for the first sketch and paid handsomely for it, but then refused a second one that you openly offered for free. The project in question really only warrants one sketch contribution per artist now.

I am trying to create more such projects to create a capacity for me to accept more sketches – free or otherwise. The problem is that it is hard to create a reasonable project that I can care about that accepts sketches from random artists with vastly different styles, each providing a random and ever changing % contribution to the whole. That is a tall ask though I have reflected on it for some time, but am no closer to coming up with something satisfactory. Maybe I’ll have a good solution someday but it is not a simple problem to resolve in a way that is interesting and acceptable to me.

What is a conceptually simple solution is to create an accordion project (i.e. expandable/flexible to scale to the need/availability of contributions) that accepts sketches for each artist individually – i.e. one such project for each artist for that artist alone. That is very doable on an individual basis, but I still need to invest heavily to originate each one, so it is only meaningful to do so for individual artists that I generally expect to get a lot of sketches from. This of course diminishes the utility of sketch projects because there are relatively few singular artists that I expect I might get a bunch of sketches from over time, generally the need is to create something that can catch all sorts of sudden free sketch gifts from completely randomized sources (vide supra see two paragraphs above this one for my thoughts and work on that).

A secondary problem here is that currently all the admittedly few artists I have worked to create an individualized accordion projects as catch-alls for their sketches have then fucked me on it. In 100% of these cases sketches were freely available and often offered freely with the hope I would take them so I felt a dire need for creating such a project for said artists each individually. Then the second I got it all set up and got one or two sketches into being fully invested in it they would either disappear from existence completely or for whatever reason they suddenly became no longer available to take sketch commissions on a topic of my choice no matter how much I was willing to pay them for each sketch (including in one case an open offer of $135 for a 45 min roughed sketch – no inking or color. That is $180 an hour for sketch work. Even if I am a completely insufferable asshole surely you can do 45 mins of work at $180 an hour once a year or something, but apparently that is suddenly too much to ask once you finally got me sold on your $25 sketches that you had no complaints about doing until I became more interested in them.)

Needless to say nothing makes me reluctant to try something again like being burned so badly in something I am emotionally and financially invested into. So while it is totally those artists rights to lure me in and then fuck me like that, it has drained me deeply of my willingness to try and make such sketch-accomidating accordian projects again with other artists. Heck such burns are so bad it even drains my ability to invest myself in any other projects at all ever. Every time I get burned like that it gets harder to want or invest myself in any project of any type of artist about anything. Two decades ago before I became a regular target for artists screwing me I was young and idealistic and energetic enough that I could accept free sketches as it was so easy to invest myself in them and thus want them. Now at the rate screwings have been regularly proceeding in another decade or so I might not want any art at all, even if it were photorealist, full color and free because I just won't be able to invest myself or care at all any more – just to much associated pain and so much drain on all my good will and personal emotional investment for me to be able to take it any more.