On Commissions and Requests

It's been asked (again) why I don't take commissions and don't do requests. So I think I'd better boil this down one more time.

Commissions: To put it bluntly, you couldn't afford it. Not because the art's so wonderful, but simply because it takes me hours and hours and hours to do a typical picture. Lineart often takes four to ten hours, and a finished colored work can be anywhere from twenty to sixty hours. At even ten bucks an hour, I'd have to charge anywhere from $200 to $600 for a finished work, and that's far outside the price range of most potential commissioners --- especially for all-digital artwork where you don't even get a canvas in the mail for your money.

Requests: I usually have plenty of ideas of my own, for one thing, and for another, most ideas that have been suggested don't inspire me. My muse is fickle, and if she doesn't get inspired, I don't draw: It's that simple. You can propose a thousand ideas, but if none of them strike me, it just won't happen. Sorry. So to save you the embarrassment of being turned down a thousand times in a row, I just say upfront, "No requests."

That's it. No commissions because you can't afford them, and no requests because my muse won't like them anyway.

But, hey, if ya got a few hundred bucks burning a hole in your pocket and you're just dying to get a PI original, maybe we can still talk