Commission Chart (early Access)! (Patreon)

Synopsis/Description:

ILLUSTRATION COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN!
(No they aren't yet! See below)

• -No animation comms
• -no comics comms
• -one image per commission

There are five available slots, and when they are filled, comms will close until all five are complete.

Thank you for your interest and your patience!

The Rant:

(NOTE: This post is advance notice for Patrons, as well as a  submission in the regular queue of art. This is not an announcement of opening comms. Coms will be open next week when this post goes public)

So!

Commissions!
They're coming back!
Woo!

(Note: You might have noticed that I'm very specific, in the Twitter Blurb, about how I won't be doing some of the things that are considered Saunter specialties, like animation, comics, or image sequences. That's because those are infinitely more complex, and, for the animation at least, would force me to transition to an hourly rate, rather than a flat one. Not only would animation/comic comms be beyond the scope of most clients to pay, but they would significantly detract from the time/energy allocated to my independent projects. That might change -some of you have A LOT of money to throw around-, but for now, I want to play it safe and stick to illustration pinups)

Commissions are an interesting thing. 

In an ideal world, they should be an easy way for clients to get art that they would normally have trouble getting elsewhere, while providing artists with a stable income and easy way to diversify their portfolios. In practice, it depends... a lot... Mostly because the generation that popularized "commissioned art" didn't really establish many rules for making sure that commissions went well. 

Commissions can go wrong for a variety of reasons. On the contractor side:

• not establishing proper basic requirements needed to start the work
• not understanding the scope of the work they are offering to complete
• Not charging according to either basic needs, the value of the work, or in a manner that befits the nature of the work.
• taking on too much work and not prioritizing the work properly
• not setting a deadline for completion of work and thus hanging on commissions indefinitely
•  Not having a protocol in place for revisions or changes.

On the client side:

• Not respecting the value/scope set by the contractor, or the inherent nature of the work
• not knowing how to effectively communicate the needs of the project until roadblocks appear.
• Not knowing how to establish feasible deadline for the work
• Not knowing how to communicate displeasure/critique respectfully or effectively
• Not knowing when/how to ask for updates in a respectful/effective manner.

To be honest/fair? I've been very lucky in that almost none of the clients (in NSFW) I've worked with have ever displayed enough of these that I felt frustrated enough to never work with them again, and anyone who I felt would be a problem, I never worked with in the first place. Also, as a client myself, I've come to realize that there are a lot of bad habits artists have that force clients to become the bad guys themselves. Most of the work that I've both finished as a contractor and received as a client has come from being regularly annoyed by the client (as a contractor) and constantly reminding the artist (as a client). I hate it, but it is a necessary annoyance.

But, my original workflow for commissions was inefficient enough that I burnt out on the idea before really coming into my own, which is why they were closed for so long.

However...

Enter the iPad! Now I can put out work a lot faster, get and implement feedback a lot sooner, and generally make people happier way faster than doing it on computer. I've gushed a lot about the iPad in previous posts, so let's move on to the chart.

The main reason the chart is a post in and of itself (as opposed to just an admin post), is because the construction of it was completely independent of the Adobe Creative Suite.

Normally, a chart like this, I'd do the art in an illustration program, and the graphic design in a vector illustration program, like Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Animate. However, since most of this production is moving to the iPad, I wanted to prove that the iPad not only could handle such tasks, but also do so without reliance from the traditional industry standards. The illustration was easy; every tablet device marketed to artists has some level of illustration software. The iPad is no different with Procreate. You can check that image, timelapse, and blurb here. 

The hard part would be the graphic design, since, traditionally, most tablets struggle with art that isn't purely illustration pinup. And while the iPad does have access to Adobe Illustrator (the program traditionally associated with graphic design and vector graphics), I wanted to migrate away from it, to prove a point that one doesn't have to be married to Illustrator and Adobe to be an artist. This is because I don't like the idea of being rendered impotent if I don't have access to my traditional software AND I don't like the idea of being married to a subscription.

So I popped open the copy of Affinity Designer that I'd bought to pad out my iPad as an all around device, and got to work. 

The first thing to do was relearn the interface and functions that I knew from Illustrator. Affinity Designer has a different UI and design philosophy from Illustrator, and while most of the tool usage fundamentals for digital design carried over, the immediate tool functions did not.

So I did a lot of googling on how masks and layers work to break down the three separate versions of the demo image into a smoothly transitioning mask. First, figuring out how to import the images, since the iPad doesn't have a traditional UI for importing images. Then figuring out how to mask the images, so it felt like a transition of images, and not an awkward cut/paste job. And then figuring out how to group the text boxes so I could migrate the boxes with the text in them, without anything coming undone.

The text didn't quite fit how I wanted, but the important thing is that it's all legible, yeah?

I also didn't get to make this as graphic as I would have liked (custom textbox shapes, a more saunterfied color palette in general), but for a first effort, its not bad AND it communicates everything I want before peeps apply.

Speaking of...

That's a lot of text, huh?

Well, that's because I want to cover as many bases as possible before taking comms. Almost everything there is the result of both a good and bad experience with comms. Not just for myself, but also people I've consulted for on comms they've gotten from other people. 

For example, the section on revisions? I've had experiences where someone either asked me to change something or asked me to critique something at a point after it couldn't be changed (usually an anatomy, perspective or conveyance issue at the coloring stage, after lineart and flats had already been established). Either way, headaches for everyone that could be avoided with more clarification. There's also the issue that the more revisions an artist does, the more it devalues the work over all, because you're spending more time/energy than you had budgeted for the piece. Essentially, doing 1.5- ∞ pieces for the price of one. Putting hard limits on stuff like that will curtail frivolous revisions, as well as not just maintain the initial value of the work, but also raise the value of revisions.

It sucks that there's a lot of text.
I don't like to do a lot of reading either.
But if I'm taking your money, it's a business, and it has to be run like one. It doesn't just mean doing the work professionally and on time, but also making sure that there are provisions in place that don't just protect me as the artist (i.e. getting punished by art platforms for doing work I was commissioned to do that I would never do normally), but also you as the client (making sure the work is done in a satisfactory manner, not just one that satisfies me).

How will this go?
We'll see, but I'd like to think the poster, at the very least, stands on its own!

What do you think?
Let me know in the comments!
Your feedback lets me know how I'm doing!
Thank you for your continued support and patronage, and I'll catcha over yonder!

-Saunter!