I just read a post that awoke me like a sleeper agent hearing their activation phrase and wrote wayyyy too much, so I’m just going to dump it here instead of clogging it with an essay. That’s not going to stop me from being a huge pretentious twat on the internet, but I’ll yap about it here instead, at least.

I’m someone who struggles a lot buying commissions for TTRPGs, OCs, and stuff like that. I’m also one of the pickiest clients of all time. Here’s my thoughts:

• I have an incredibly small brain, and I always dread the inevitable “how does this look” or “just checking in, how do you want me to do X”. It’s gotten so bad that I usually have a third party serve as a broker- I give the third party some money, they take a little off the top, then they talk to the artist instead of me, handling things like when the artist asks for feedback part-way through. Furthermore, on the topic of my crippling fear of the artist asking me for more details:
• I (personally) buy designs, not technical implementations of concrete specifications. Don’t get me wrong, I write very technical specifications… But that’s for my job, when I’m getting paid for that labor. That’s a completely different context. Usually, when I find an artist I really like, it’s because they’re super creative and great at composing brilliant compositions to capture ineffable stuff. Furthermore, for most of my use-cases, I really, really want to offload a lot of design work where I can. I’m a big dum-dum and I can’t afford to do everything, and I like help in the creative process so much that I’m willing to pay for it (duh)! In my ideal world, I can give goals, e.g. the piece shall contain X, Y, and Z, doing W, and some reference pictures… But I wouldn’t have to be prescriptive about posing, camera angles, color theory, shading, framing, or anything like that, because I just don’t know about those things. In my experience, an artist who has been working on character design for years is going to do 100x better than whatever I come up with, anyway. Plus: Design is labor! It’s something you can charge extra for! If, for $5, an artist comes up with an outfit instead of asking me to go find a reference, I’m over the moon with joy. I’m not a fashionista! I wish more people offered services like this.
• There’s also the matter of licensing- I’ve been burned by spending a lot of money on something, only to be jabbed in the gut by the artist later saying “psych, I actually own the intellectual property for this and you can’t post this on your webpage/stream” or whatever… Which, I mean, fine, there are plenty of good reasons to buy that kind of art, but usually I have a specific use-case in mind and I’d be glad to have paid extra for the IP if I’d known it was going to be a problem! Unfortunately, I’ve been informed that talking to artists about GPLv3 or Creative Commons is a quick way to get flagged as an obnoxious, pretentious client and get turned down. :( In my social sphere, where 3D models are sold a lot, this even sometimes escalates beyond informal client blocklists all the way to legal action, so I’m extra terrified of artists in those circumstances. It’s very much a buyers beware thing, and so I avoid anyone who isn’t upfront about their legal paperwork like the plague. As you can probably imagine, this narrows my options considerably.
• I have no idea how to tip. Expectations for this vary radically. I absolutely adore when I’m sent an invoice or something like that which makes tipping impossible, so I can know the expected amount I have to play without the big guessing game. The absolute worst form of this is what one of my friends is broadcasting right now as their Discord status: “comms are open/pay what you want”. I just am not on that level of 7D social chess to figure out how much to pay.
• This is niche, but I like having access to the “source code” for the art (i.e. a .PSD file, .XCF file, or whatever graphics format your art software produces). This lets me make tweaks, cutouts, and variants. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to traditional media. Also obviously, this is incompatible with a lot of the Universal Unspoken Licensing Agreement: It makes artists’ watermarks way easier to remove. Again, this is why licensing is important to me: It allows me to make modifications!

The best solution to these problems I’ve found is the middleman strategy. I would recommend that to any other client in my position. If you’re willing to pay extra, I found a guy who- no joke- got me the actual original artist of a huge web project I’m a fan of to draw my OC, which I would have never been able to do by my pitiful self!

Other than that, the second-best choice (which admittedly isn’t great) is Skeb:

• It protects me from talking to artists! In fact, talking to the artist is actually forbidden by the site’s code of conduct, and vice versa. If I don’t give good details about what I want, I take on the responsibility for the output not being what I want, instead of this weird joint responsibility model that exists in other comm spaces. The same goes in reverse, I’d imagine: Artists would be protected from individual horrible, whiny clients. The system has flaws, but it’s the only thing that works perfectly for my use case.
• It lays out clear legal boundaries for how the work can be used. Admittedly, “The rights of each work belong to each creator, and prohibit reproduction without permission.”, which is useless 90% of the time for me, but at least they’re upfront about it.
• The payment is precisely defined. No tip-jar guessing.

From the artist-protection side of the arrangement, I imagine it would be nice because the customer pretty much entirely yields their right to refund and IP, and it doesn’t provide any infrastructure preventing fussy clients retaliating against artists (e.g. “purchaser reviews” aren’t a metric). Not an artist though, so can’t comment on whether they’re actually any good at this.

My friend also uses this platform called VGEN. It’s apparently got some of the power of skeb behind it too, but no anonymity. For people without huge brain-rot about design principles like me, it’s probably great.

My friend Oz does this Strange Pear Gallery of Fine Arts thing that I hang out at all the time, and he also talks a ton about client work. I have no idea how any of this stuff works- again, head small- but he kinda has this gimmick about selling art, so I defer to his judgement on a lot of stuff like this.