(no subject)

[zyleeth.livejournal.com]

Okay, first post. It kind of sucks because I've only recently started taking commissions, and I hoped I wouldn't have to post here so soon.

I was commissioned almost exactly two months ago by serareskel for a colored pencil piece of her dragon character. She pays up front, and after a week or so I finish her commission to her satisfaction and no harm was done. Then after a few days she notes me on DeviantART requesting that I made a mistake in drawing her feet (I added pink paw pads, and they are supposed to be just plain), which granted, she never mentioned in her description. I figured it wasn't too unreasonable, so I spent some more time on the drawing and changed the paw pads from pink to blue.

But then it still wasn't good enough, because I had lightly inked the pads with a small point pen, and she didn't want the lines there. D: Okay...so I went back in Photoshop (I am WAY new at digital art stuff) and figured out how to remove the inked lines, so all there was left were bare feet. I showed it to her, and she asked me to fix some blur issue with the feet, so I redid the whole process. At this point I still didn't charge her extra for the changes. After that she seemed satisfied.

Then a few days later she notes me again saying that there is an unsightly blur on the right wing (a miniscule spot), which I personally could not find at all. I told her to specify where the blur was, which was a small part of the wing. I actually had to zoom in and look for it for a minute before I saw what she was talking about. I don't even remember using the blur tool on any part of the drawing other than the feet. I told her there wasn't much I could do about it, but that I would try. Rescanning the entire thing didn't help, because the feet would have to be redone a third time. Normally I wouldn't mind that, but I have too much other art that needs finishing to go back on a past commission because all of a sudden there was a problem with it. I tried to figure out how to fix the blur, but I finally had to tell her that I was unable to but I would do something small to make up for it, like an icon. She said she just wanted the tiny blur fixed.

About this time, I had almost 20 notes from her asking me to fix the blur. I asked some friends to look at the drawing themselves, and NONE of them could even see where it was. She's left me alone for a few weeks, but now she is having some of her friends harass me about fixing the blur. I've told her several times that I didn't know how to fix the blur, and offered her another small drawing as an apology for my digital incompetance.

So there's my story, and I'm feeling pretty crappy that one of my first commissions turned out this way. :( Even worse that I couldn't fix such a TINY, hardly-noticable blur, though I did try to make up for it. It just....when she had her friend harass me about it was the last straw. My opinion is that even though she payed up front and in a timely manner, its just NOT worth working with her. Its like nothing I tried to do was good enough.

Comments

[kitsuken.livejournal.com]

On the subject of the colour change, there's a real quick way you can do that in photoshop. Just create a new layer, pick the colour you actually want and paint over the section you want to change the colour of. Once that's done, change the layer mode to color (the drop down left of opacity) and go to image>ajustments>hue/saturation and play about with those till it looks good. Works 90% of the time (the catch being it's a little more tricky if you've used a different colour for the shadows. With something like this though you can't really tell that it's unintentional)