Thank you for your thought-out explanations, they do give a good perspective from the artist's side.
While I do usually ask for a lot of very specific details, I try as much as I can to be considerate of the artist and professional as a customer. As a rule I am very good about paying and have also commissioned some rather expensive artists because I wanted specifically them to do the work. I'm willing to pay more if it means a better outcome and in cases where I really believe the artist had worked harder.
I usually make it very clear from the get-go what it is that I want, the level of detail that I want and which details are most important. I also try to establish in advance approximately how long the commission will take, where the artist tells me how long s/he thinks s/he'll need, but that once that's established, we stick to that. At that point the artist can always back out if they don't want to do it, but I've never had an artist back out.
I only ever commission someone if there's something very specific I want to see that had not been done before, to the extent that I know, and this is why detail is important, and why I am willing to pay a lot sometimes. Therefore indeed there were times I'd asked the artist to revise something s/he'd done multiple times. I think if artists do intend to charge for revisions, they should make that clear in their original rules, because while it does make sense as you say that if there was room for artistic freedom and the artist did their best to depict something the way they thought the commissioner wanted it, they should of course be paid for their work.
Sometimes indeed it is inevitable that something comes out differently from what you had expected, even when you thought you'd described very specifically what it should look like, because you'd not taken into consideration that it could still come out some other way - in my experience I would usually catch that sort of thing in original drafts that were made specifically in order for me to see if there was anything about it I would want changed.
While I understand that asking for a lot of detail can be annoying, on the other hand some artists prefer that because they say it gives them much more direction as far as what they need to do. Likewise, expensive commissions are an investment and I don't feel there's a point in paying a lot of money to get something you might have just found for free browsing the web because it's so different from what you had wanted. All in all, I've had a generally positive experience and friendly relationship working with artists, except for my first two commissions where the artists took a ridiculous amount of time to deliver (a year and almost a year). Since then I always establish a deadline in advance and it had not been a problem after that.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-01-30 11:16 pm (UTC)While I do usually ask for a lot of very specific details, I try as much as I can to be considerate of the artist and professional as a customer. As a rule I am very good about paying and have also commissioned some rather expensive artists because I wanted specifically them to do the work. I'm willing to pay more if it means a better outcome and in cases where I really believe the artist had worked harder.
I usually make it very clear from the get-go what it is that I want, the level of detail that I want and which details are most important. I also try to establish in advance approximately how long the commission will take, where the artist tells me how long s/he thinks s/he'll need, but that once that's established, we stick to that. At that point the artist can always back out if they don't want to do it, but I've never had an artist back out.
I only ever commission someone if there's something very specific I want to see that had not been done before, to the extent that I know, and this is why detail is important, and why I am willing to pay a lot sometimes. Therefore indeed there were times I'd asked the artist to revise something s/he'd done multiple times. I think if artists do intend to charge for revisions, they should make that clear in their original rules, because while it does make sense as you say that if there was room for artistic freedom and the artist did their best to depict something the way they thought the commissioner wanted it, they should of course be paid for their work.
Sometimes indeed it is inevitable that something comes out differently from what you had expected, even when you thought you'd described very specifically what it should look like, because you'd not taken into consideration that it could still come out some other way - in my experience I would usually catch that sort of thing in original drafts that were made specifically in order for me to see if there was anything about it I would want changed.
While I understand that asking for a lot of detail can be annoying, on the other hand some artists prefer that because they say it gives them much more direction as far as what they need to do. Likewise, expensive commissions are an investment and I don't feel there's a point in paying a lot of money to get something you might have just found for free browsing the web because it's so different from what you had wanted. All in all, I've had a generally positive experience and friendly relationship working with artists, except for my first two commissions where the artists took a ridiculous amount of time to deliver (a year and almost a year). Since then I always establish a deadline in advance and it had not been a problem after that.