(Accidental alliteration FTW. Heh, there it is again!)

A quick tl;dr: restricting or possibly ending requests, might shift towards commissions instead.

Well, summer vacation is here, Cintiq still ded (thanks for your excellent support system, Wacom), and I am faced with an abundance of free time at the expense of any meaningful goals or responsibilities until fall. I've been trying to find a job for the summer, to no avail, and I've been wondering if I might be better off taking the time to work on opening up commissions. Not so much to earn a meager income as to have something to do over the summer. If I can ever get Wacom to actually help me with my busted tablet (or if I can finally get used to using my old Intuos again) that would certainly make my potential commission pieces faster, neater, more colorful, and more complete - however, in the meantime, I'll probably be doing cheaper sketch or pen-and-ink commissions à la the requests I've done previously.

Now, since I've never really regarded my work with much objective value, I've not really wanted to do paid work in lieu of free, simple requests. In my experience, having to create art for extrinsic rewards just kills my motivation to do it and the piece feels more like a menial task than a work of art. This is something I've been thinking about for a while, but it often seems (unsurprisingly) like I'm in the minority for not just wanting to do art for free, but to actively oppose doing it for money or prestige. That probably sounds really snooty and pretentious, sorry.

However, I have been talking to a few people about this, and for the most part, I've been told that I shouldn't be giving out free work all willy-nilly. I've told people about how I offered to make a t-shirt design for somebody in real life - for free - and been told I was taken advantage of even after I explained that I adamantly refused payment even when my "client" offered on multiple occasions. I've been reading horror stories from artists on the internet about getting screwed over by businesses who view their work as cheap, disposable media that can be exploited to no ends, and I hate to think that a mindset like mine could unintentionally be feeding that toxic behavior.

The more I think about it, that last thing seems like a bit of a stretch. In truth, I'm not hopelessly conflicted over the issue but am beginning to think of favoring commission work instead of free requests. While I may keep doing select requests under certain circumstances (as a reward for something, maybe, or in exchange for requests from others), I'm going to look at starting up some cheapo commissions to test out the system. I'm shooting for doing $5 sketches and $10 lineart to begin; not too much more for complex stuff. If I can manage to secure a summer job, I'll be more open to the idea of opening up a requests form again, but requests will probably have to be restricted to quick sketches or something, whereas my previous requests kinda varied in levels of completion.

Well, there's not really much else to say. Stay frosty, m80's.