I feel like this might not be the most mature thing to rant about but it’s really bothered me a lot looking back at how requests went down. There are just so many negative experiences that now when I get approached asking about a request it just feels like “here’s more people crawling out of the woodworks sniffing around for free art.” I think the feeling is stronger when coming from an absolute stranger and it smacks me of them really not taking the time to bother and look and just bothers me instead about getting it.

This should be very basic etiquette but if you are communicating or meeting an artist for the first time, don’t ask them to draw for you. If you aren’t sure if they take requests maybe look around their pages, but I can tell you it really sours an experience to have your first impression of a person be that they are trying to get free art out of you. And I tell you I can at least remember this happening maybe twice in the past two weeks. Think about it, the very first time you’re meeting someone and interacting with them, does it feel appropriate to ask them to work for you without anything in return? Any compliments that follow after just makes it feel so shallow like you don’t even really care, you just want free drawings.

That being said I’ve done a number of requests in the past, and I found in the case when I did do them the negative experiences far outweighed the positive:

•I’ve had people ask for edits and changes despite the work being free and knowing they were in a queue of ten.

•I’ve had people complain about the final product, but think that a “thank you” would make it alright.

•I’ve been hounded to give permission to give exclusive posting rights to the person I drew for. They actually didn’t look to see if that I HAD given them permission before hounding me again (which only made me delete the piece and revoke exclusive use). My inbox was FLOODED all morning on f-list.

•Ever see the episode of South Park with the homeless people where if you gave them money, they just asked for more? They didn’t say thank you and it never even registered with them that they got something? Yeah, I had some people like that. After being given a request they’d just move on and be like “Okay now let’s move to the next one!” as if I had some contract to draw whatever they wanted all the time. Like show some fucking decency and be happy to get a free piece.

•That being said when said people were rebuffed they often would ask when was the next time I’d be open. I bullshitted numbers like 4 months and would get asked “So in 4 months you’ll draw for me again?” NO. Yeah, can you imagine being given something from an artist and thinking it was totally appropriate to push them to draw again?

•I’ve had complete strangers want me to remind them when requests might be open even though we just spoke for the first time and like WHY would you think this is a reasonable thing to ask artists to do?

•I’ve had people ask for ANIMATIONS and when I said I’d do it for money they’d just say “Oh, I’ll wait for you to do them for free” since I had the reputation of doing requests. Like don’t be a dick and do this to artists.

I’m just done. No more requests. At least trades felt like a neutral experience. At least commissions felt rather positive (aside from me undercutting myself, which was my problem admittedly. Don’t price too low or you’ll burn yourself out). But requests have just been too much for me. There are just too many people that just trawl about looking for free art and don’t actually care about how hard the artist works and how thankful they should be. I will still be taking applications to use some characters on some of my projects but those are different from requests and I am very choosy on what I use for those.

I just feel better having this off my chest. From now on I am going to draw for myself, and the people that I feel like drawing for.