A lot of things have changed in the past 2 years since I posted my last journal jotting down my ideas on how to effectively take commissions. Turns out, one of the best solutions to the problems I was originally facing is just- don't do commissions.

I have a job now that's not related to art, and keeps me comfortable to the point where I don't feel the need to take commissions or do YCH's anymore. That's why most of my recent art has been gifts, requests, or personal stuff. But I'm starting to see the main problems with this approach:

• I enjoy drawing people's characters, particularly characters I see getting a lot of commissions and recognize. With no commissions, I never attract these people because they're constantly scanning for open coms slots.
• It puts a lot of effort on my part to reach out and contact people I want to draw for or trade with, and with my anxiety that just means I rarely ever do. So artist's characters and random characters I find and like are usually off the table too.
• Drawing solo art of my chars when I can't find anyone else is boring me to death

I tried to solve this by posting a request thread, but understandably it doesn't attract enough of what I'm looking for (I know I don't like posting my refs in request threads personally). Though I do find some cute inspiration there at times. Now I'm stuck with this new problem and have to think of a solution. I came up with a couple below and I wanted some opinions on them:

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1. Open commissions anyway
I'd temporarily open cheap commissions as a way to get easy inspiration both for characters and for ideas. Opening commissions offloads the work onto the commissioner to both 'approach' me and provide the idea, and unlike public request threads commissioners would be more likely to submit ideas in private (I think). By submitting specific ideas, I wouldn't be as worried about 'blanket consent' like the request thread gives, and I can get back to drawing harder stuff.

I'd open for a couple days to let everyone submit the ideas and characters, then I'd close them. The price will be low enough to hopefully not be a problem for many like my YCHs, but high enough to prevent it from getting overloaded. Then, I'd close them, pick up to 5 to keep the line short, and let everyone know the chosen have been contacted. This lets the others know their idea wasn't picked and prevents them from being in limbo so they can go elsewhere or stash it for next time.

After I'm done with that batch, repeat. Hopefully with only a couple pics at a time, I can repeat this every month or two and people will have more chances.


2. Figure out a way to have private requests again.
I used to have a request page on my old website, but I have since redesigned the entire site from scratch and lost them all. I used to have a second request site after that, but then Twitter's API went paid and I could no longer authenticate who you were, so that got scrapped too.

One solution is I could make the request page again on the new site, a private area you can upload refs and ideas and I can draw from. Unfortunately that means you won't know if I plan on doing your idea, or if it's doomed and you should move on.

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Anyway I hope I can fix my art machine a bit because sitting around after work and not knowing who or what to draw is starting to wear on me. Any ideas appreciated.

Thanks everyone for all the feedback about commissions! I think I've narrowed down what I might want to do, but I still have a couple things to iron out:

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The idea: Open commissions indefinitely.

1. Work with people to craft their ideas into something I'd like to draw, if possible.

2. Add them to the end of a commission waitlist, without any payment. The waitlist can be as long as needed.

3. Work from the commission waitlist in roughly chronological order.

4. When someone's next up, ask if they still want the idea and take payment if so.
- If they don't want that specific idea but still want the slot, we can talk about a new one.
- If the original idea is no longer something I want to draw, let them know and work with them to change it if possible.
- If they want extra time such as for payment, they can push their slot back 5, 10, however many slots.
- If they don't respond in time or say they don't want it, on to the next person no problem. Maybe they can pass it to someone else if they have a good idea too.

5. In between regular commission cycle, I will also occasionally do requests, gifts, art trades, stream commissions, YCHs, personal art, etc.

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The (pretty major) problems:

- Some commission ideas are pretty close to unsalvageable. Since I'm into nearly every fetish if done right, it's usually because the characters are not attractive to me. Because coms are permanently open, I would have to straight up tell these people that I am not interested in doing a commission for them with that character. This will cause a lot of mental stress on me, and likely make some people very upset because they may think it's something wrong with their character. And it wouldn't be like 5% of characters, I'd estimate about 60% of characters I wouldn't be interested in drawing, so this is going to be a problem I need to either get used to or fix somehow.

- I'm usually pretty silent about why I choose to draw certain commission ideas and not others because the long list of reasons is rather stupid, but there are a plethora of things that can happen between accepting the com slot and getting to it that will make me not want to draw that specific idea or even character anymore. I don't know how to deal with that other than just being vague and saying 'Your turn is up next but I don't really feel comfortable with this anymore, could we think of something else?'. Especially if they saw me draw the sameish thing the day before or shortly after. I guess I could work in the 'volatility' of an idea at the time of discussing it?

- How would I handle pricing? Would I lock in a price at the time of accepting the com, or surprise them with the price when their turn comes around? Maybe give a possible price range but say it's just an estimate and I'll have a better idea when I get to them? There's no obligation to take a com when your turn comes up so I don't see what's wrong with that.

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As for how to ease into this method and diffuse the initial small wave of people, I'd likely open up and get all the commission ideas together and sorted out until they teeter off, then put it all through a list randomizer to choose the starting order at first. After that, just tack on new commissions to the end.

Any thoughts or concerns? Has anyone else done this or know any artists that do?

Heya, figured I'd make a journal because Twitter's text limit is a bit too restrictive for it.

I've been thinking about how best to handle commissions. Because as much as I want to do them, I feel like the standard ways of going about it doesn't work with me.
Here's a couple thoughts that make taking commissions hard for me:

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I'm very picky about the ideas I want to draw. This mainly for personal reasons. I'd be more inclined to take whatever I can get if commissions were my main source of income, which they aren't. This means whatever the method, I have to be able to pick and choose in some way. This means no 'first to take the slots' style coms.

I get stressed about people waiting, and it compounds back on itself. If I take slots and payment upfront, and I don't finish them nearly immediately, I get stressed about the wait and it makes me not want to draw coms at all (because I want to do my best and I'm not feeling my best), which makes them wait longer, which makes me feel worse, which loops back on itself indefinitely. But because this is the best method I've come up with, I've always done slots.
I've also had the idea of taking slots, but not taking payment until I get to them. While that makes me feel better about the wait, I know from friends and myself that commissioners prefer paying upfront with reputable artists in order to not have a 'surprise' when suddenly their slot comes up and they don't have enough to pay for it at the time.

Another way was to be open 24/7, which would mean a couple things:
- I'd have to tell people upfront that what they want to get isn't something I feel comfortable drawing, and this is something I absolutely know I'd have to say a lot, and I really feel bad doing that. When doing slots, I may get 30 to 50 com requests and I pick about 5. The rest that didn't make it are anywhere from 'I really want to do that but it didn't make the cut' to 'I really don't want to do that'. But because I don't have to directly give a reason, everyone can assume theirs was very close to making it and everyone's happy.
- Open 24/7 means I somehow have to cut back on the number of people who want to com me to a reasonable and sustainable pace. The only way I can think of doing this is raising prices to lower demand. I know my prices are "too low" because of the number of commission submissions I get when I open, but I'm uncomfortable raising them too much, let alone enough to make 24/7 coms come in at a reasonable pace.

I could also do YCH's, which while they guarantee I draw something I'm alright with and I can do them at my pace, they have two drawbacks:
- I've seen a lot of great ideas from great commissioners and I'd much rather stick to doing other people's ideas at least some of the time since I don't think I by myself can come up with half of the stuff y'all do.
- Because it's an auction, the price can and has gotten up to ridiculous prices. I've gotten hate for that, and while I've gotten really good at ignoring that, knowing a pic costs 8x my usual com prices makes me anxious to even draw it because I stress about it not being good enough. I can prevent this by putting an autobuy price, but if it's too low it becomes a race and I've gotten negative feedback from the 'I wasn't fast enough' or 'I didn't see it in time' crowd too.

Recently I've been doing in-stream commissions, but I've been choosing them based on random roll and I worry about the kind of ideas I may get and have to say no to, and they're limited to colored sketches max because of time restrictions. (I prefer finishing stream coms on-stream same-day) so no animations or 'full' shaded stuff.

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I don't know, there's a lot of options and in general they all have drawbacks in some way, so I've pretty much just been doing personal art, art trades, and fanart for friends and peeps I admire in the meantime. But I'd like to branch out again. Which method do you personally prefer or would like to see me find some sort of solution for so I can do it that way?

Anyway I'm rambling because I don't know what to do when I finish my last couple coms here shortly, so any ideas are welcome.

Back again after like 2 years of private coms with another try at some public ones! The form will be open for 24 hours, and then I'll pick a couple I like from the submissions. Prices, options, and more com process info in the link!

>>> https://forms.gle/iJ4EL4Gy3u7mD5bF7 <<<

I'm not sure what to do with him, tbh.
A lot of my characters are overdue for a makeover/touchup and I've been thinking about Turq specifically, my horsedick'd wolf boyo.
Let me paint the backstory. He was converted over from a pony OC to a wolf, and things were going okay other than it was difficult for me to nail down a new fur pattern design.
One major problem that kept cropping up was - I dislike dog dicks. I like long floppy relatively same-thickness flesh tubes, not weird lumpy hard.. things? Where 1/4th of it isn't even really usable until the end?
In general, I like about 80% of horsedicks I see drawn, and like, 5% at most dog dicks I see drawn.

I thought this wouldn't be too much of a problem, but I found that after giving him a dog dick I almost completely stopped voluntarily drawing him. Instead, I drew my zebra boy Alhaz since I liked his design and dick a lot better.
In response, I just converted Turq over to having a horse dick too and I instantly started drawing him more. I don't necessarily want him to have a horse dick, but I like them so much better and dog dicks so much less that I don't want to give up having fun drawing a character just cause of their dick.

Anyway I don't know why I'm mentioning this, I'd like to fix his design up a bit to be less eye-rolly but this is one of the problems right now.

Update to my previous post;

For those out of the loop and don't want to read, the short version is that I want to draw via requests instead of commissions for a while and see how that works out, since I have a full time job now.
My problem then is, how do I get ideas and characters to draw? I used to have the OC binder where you could upload your characters and list the fetishes you don't mind me drawing with them. It had two flaws, though: 1. I had no way to know if you were actually the character owner. And 2. A list of fetishes wasn't specific enough for me to feel comfortable drawing characters without asking about an exact idea.

So I came up with a solution with help from the commenters of the last journal:
Allow anyone to submit specific requests for artwork, and choose from those. They can submit requests once they sign in with Twitter's 'sign in with twitter' feature, so I can guarantee you are who you say you are.

And the result is my new requests site!
https://requests.ralek.art/

You can upload refs, give some global details, then start submitting requests for each idea you'd like to do! There's no limit, but also no guarantee that anything will be drawn, of course.
Hopefully this will make me more comfortable with taking requests and I'll be able to use this significantly more than the binder in the future.

Thanks everyone!

For a while I treated art like a job, working on whatever people would commission of me. As I got slightly more popular, instead of raising the base prices I decided to keep the price the same and just be more picky with what I drew, this led to occasionally having 50-100 commission requests at a time when I would open. Whatever I 'lost' by not charging what people were 'willing' to pay was made up by how fun it was to draw ideas I genuinely liked.
As the years passed this stayed roughly the same, but I've recently found a full time job which pays enough for me to live comfortably by itself. Art has turned from something I needed to do to live, to something I needed to do for excess fun money, to something I didn't need to do at all. I don't know what the future holds, but that's how it is for now.
I of course still love artwork and the scenarios in them, even with my limited time to draw. And that's where this journal comes in. I don't know what to do to balance this whole situation. Here's my thoughts, to understand the conundrum:

I don't want to open or even really do commissions anymore, at least not conventionally. My full time job makes me take longer than I feel comfortable with on pictures which I could easily do in less than a week if it was my main job. I always aim for under 2 months, but the job has pushed that window to between 1-5 months for a single commission of any detail level. And while some people may be comfortable waiting that long for a pic, I don't really feel comfortable taking that long.

I don't want to limit myself to pics only involving my characters solo, or with my other characters. Or pics of 'popular' characters like Krystal or Loona or whatever the flavor of the month is. The former because a lot of my characters canonically hate each other and drawing them fucking would be weird for me, and the later because I don't find any joy in drawing popular 'canon' characters, and the popularity/exposure/money/whatever that comes with drawing them isn't currently attractive to me. This leaves one type of artwork I enjoy drawing: My characters with other people's characters.

So now there's a new problem, if I don't want to do commissions because I don't have the time, and the only art I like is art with my characters + other characters, and I'm notoriously antisocial with only a handful of artist friends, how do I choose who's characters to draw?

Enter the Character Binder.
The character binder was my solution to this problem many years ago. It was meant to be a list of characters from people who may not know me personally, but like my art enough to want me to draw their characters. It allows you to write down what I'm allowed to draw with the character, and I can pick characters I like from it to draw free fanart of. But it has a dark secret, I've never used it.
At least not the way it was intended. I have drawn many characters on it, but if it was an explicit picture in any way (Which all of them have been except for 1), I already knew and was friends with the owner ahead of time. And let me explain why.
The first problem is that I have no true way to tell if the characters submitted are owned by the actual owners. I don't want to put a lot of effort into a pic just to find out the actual owner hates it because the binder was used maliciously by someone else.
The second problem is I don't want to step on toes in any way, and the form you have to fill out, while detailed, is vague enough where I feel like I could easily make a mistake and piss someone off because I think one fetish implies another, or maybe combine two fetishes but suddenly they're not okay with that combination, or whatever else. Basically me being paranoid.
The solution would be to message the character owner if i wanted to draw them, just to double check the ownership/idea. But the second I message them, there's this expectation that I'm going to actually draw something.
Despite there being several characters I'd love to draw on there, I just haven't used it.

So that's why I'm here. What are your thoughts?

TLDR: I am busy, but I still want to draw stuff. The only stuff I like to draw a lot of the time is my char + other chars. I have no reliable way of limiting or crowdsourcing these 'other characters', with little to no commitment or expectations on my behalf.

I figured the best way to take coms wouldn't be a first-come-first-serve basis, as that would be unfair to many who are asleep or late to the party.
Instead, I'm going to open commissions for 12-24 hours and pick those that sound great! I'll pick between 3 and 5 slots.
Hopefully this will become a regular thing. So once I finish those up, I'll be back at it relatively soon opening them up again!

Before submitting an idea or ideas, please have a glance over the terms and conditions! They're pretty standard, but still.

I also offer discounts up to 55% on ideas I find hot or fun to draw! Click here for a list of them on my Trello.

>> View prices and submit commission ideas here! <<
You can get a rough idea of pricing here, though it's subject to change next time! Remember about the discounts above.