To both artists and clients who requested commissions from artists, what was the worst client/artist experience ever?

I've been extremely lucky. No bad experiences so far. I struggle to get any commissions these days, but in the past I got a lot more. I guess some people were a little abrupt or didn't say thanks. But I couldn't care less if I tried, as long as I get paid.

got scammed recently, wouldnt pay the 50% they owed me after completion, figured ppl wouldnt run away after paying 50% (esp bc they only owed me like 7 more) but man. oof. also special mention to the client i worked with who totally ignored my tos regarding deadlines

Not a single bad experience so far, I hope it keeps that way for a while.

All of mine were before I started charging in advance, and it's the same story every time. Client has a long, drawn-out series of mounting requests because they haven't paid me yet and they think it'll all be free, the time comes to pay, and then they haggle, argue or drag their heels for weeks or months before I finally get what I'm owed.

2nd worst are all the non-clients: people I schedule time for, people whose ideas I listen to at length, people that say money and time isn't an issue riiiiiight up until the last minute where "oops! I can't pay you. Would you take stock in my stupid fake company? Would you take equity in this project that can't even afford to pay artists?" Man, fuck off.

My worst commission experience is I never got commission

My worst experience as a commission artist was this one person from Furaffinity who wanted one of my YCHs. I do mostly NSFW stuff so all the people who I’ve worked with have been really chill, but this guy had a stick up his ass or something. (He wanted multiple slots and the total would have been $120 btw). Anyway, I’ve always been super friendly with everyone of my commissioners and am still friends with a handful of them. So at the time I had a waitlist and I told them that they needed to wait their turn (which they were fine with), but I said in the meantime, we can continue talking if they wanted to.

For some reason, they got offended and thought that I was trying to manipulate and gaslight them? I think they thought I didn’t care about them because I said it was okay if they didn’t want to talk. I really don’t know why they thought that, but they ended up backing out of the commission and sent me several emails about how “unprofessional” I was. That also posted several “shouts” on my profile page about how awful I was as a person before blocking me on everything. WHAT?

I really don’t know if I did anything wrong, and I showed the chat to multiple people and we unanimously agree they are not of right mind. But now I don’t really engage in small talk because of them. But if you do want to talk or commission me, we can absolutely get to know each other and become friends outside of commissions.

Do you guys think I did anything wrong here? Advice is appreciated.

That’s just garbage! Sorry that happened to you!

Best of luck on keeping that streak!

“Oh, payment’s today? You see, erm, I have some business to do this month, and I know we negotiated before on when I pay you, but you know, like, life happens and that payment may be postponed until next year or so… hope you understaaaaaaaaaaand. Excellent piece though.”

Honestly, as a client, I had the occasional run-in with payment errors (especially with blasted PayPal): fortunately, I never left an artist hanging for any finished commissioned work I have requested! However, I do remember one scenario where I requested a commission worth a certain amount of money, paid the whole amount through PayPal upfront, but the money was left in pending because both me and the artist refused to put personal information on our PayPal accounts to make either transaction verifiable. The commission request was immediately cancelled after that.

After that day, I had a major disclaimer for every commission I requested from an artist that relates to my limitations with PayPal. If the artist knows it might not be processed, then the deal’s canceled right there. It was all the way until I got me a proper business account this year that those shackles were finally broken!

Still… I give the stink-eye whenever I had to log in to that blasted payment processing site…

So what I believe you were doing was setting up client's request regardless of how far behind they were behind the queue, is that right? I don’t see anything wrong with that! In fact, that’s something I would love to see an artist do: that way, when the time comes, they’ve already got the request planned out. And for multiple slots, I can see why you wanted more info on that guy’s request in particular!

People are complicated mother f@$kers! I believe it’s the wording that might’ve set the client off even though you didn’t mean anything negative by it. Sometimes you have to be as robotic and impersonal as possible in order to prevent such a short fuse from being lit. Instead of “You need to wait your turn, but in the meantime, we can continue talking if you want” it’s better to say “Thank you for requesting a piece from me! I currently have a waitlist and your position in the queue is XX. In the meantime, would you like to provide further details on your commission request?”

Something like that. Honestly, I’m not that much of a customer service rep myself, so take my suggestion with a grain of salt!

Since I ask full payment in advance, I tend to not have much bad. Sometimes there are migraine worthy experiences, but that's humans to you :)

I hear ya!

You know, I’m genuinely curious about something. I doubt I’ll get any responses here, but I wonder if there were clients here who got the bad-end of a transaction. Maybe it’s because the artist market is so competitive, it’s rarer for an artist to screw over a client since that might increase bad rep, but I dunno.

I am not sure if it is rarer as scamming IS a thing and has no boundaries. When i delved in DA back on days, then there were so many posts how artists didn't deliver and now with AI, reading X and comments there, then there's new wave of artistic scammers - those, who use AI and pretend it to be their own work as well ai "artists" who do not even bother to deliver their 4 prompt 10 second gen to their paying fool.

So... scamming comes form both sides - hence the popular 50:50 rule that is probably most common model of payment. Money is something everyone needs and everyone wants.

I have never commissioned an artist over web - as those, I'd commission wouldn't do any, and those are do are not my cup of tea or use Patreon and I refuse to use Patreon as that platform asks too much personal information and puts all responsibility to user. I am used to better services, where platform and client share 50:50 and I do not have to tell them my full life story.

I've been trying to get people to move over to Payoneer since they don't double and triple dip with fees, and their currency conversion isn't quite as sussy. Plenty of issues with it, but just the feeling of not using PayPal makes it worth the struggle.

I haven't had to deal with it, but Paypal is apparently super anti-vendor when it comes to transaction disputes, just doing chargebacks with no questions asked, with fees that the vendor has to pay on top of yoinking your money away. Fuuuuck that. With all the risks and imbalances that favor the commissioner over the artist, it's amazing there are still any artists out there rolling the dice on getting cash on delivery or doing 50/50 deals.

I do have something related to problems with the artist, from art trades and other people's commission stories. Not any specific story, because the ones I have aren't interesting, but a general trend and rule of thumb.

It is an inherently risky maneuver to ask for art from someone who has any significant problems with mental health. Things like mental breakdowns, depression, or anything else that can make them suddenly drop off the face of the internet. Often, these can cause the artist to either go radio silent and forget about the art, or outright decide they can't do the artwork you wanted anymore (bigger deal if it's a trade because they can't "refund" time that you spent doing your own part of it).

This is, of course, not moral bankruptcy, but usually a matter of putting too many eggs into one basket. Most young artists who are very online - the group most likely to have mental health problems - use art commissions as their only way to make money. So they end up overworking themselves because they need the money, and then disappear because they need the break. It's not a fun cycle to be in.

This can be solved, though - I do have some advice to anyone out there who needs money but may need to take breaks from art/dealing with people. Create a product that isn't custom, isn't meant to be in limited supply, and is digital (so you can't run out of it), and put it up for sale. Something like a set of generic themed emotes, a group of brushes or stamps, etc. That way you can still have money coming in for your work without having to talk to people directly.

That’s a good suggestion. Thank you for sharing! :3

i don't get lots of commissions in the first place, so i dont have a TON of bad stories, but there was a time i almost got scammed. i dont know what they were expecting to happen because i always ask for full payment up front before i even start drawing. they sent me a really badly edited fake paypal screenshot as 'proof' that they paid it, and i knew it wasnt paid cuz i never got a notification from paypal nor an email saying someone sent me money, and i was on mobile at the time so i would have seen if i did. found out right before blocking them that they had stolen art on their account and were impersonating the artist they stole it from. it was really fucking weird

First I’ve heard of that service!

Reciepts. Never take those for granted!

Happened on Instagram. Was the first time someone wanted to commission me. Was so excited that I didn't realize that I nearly got scammed. "Client" offered to pay me more than I put out (something I really should've known). Tried to get me to do all sorts of things. I was at least smart enough to not put my personal information out there.

So advocate for pay first? I want to start commissions at some point so getting some perspective helps.

oof, heard alot of stories on instascam. paying more than agreed, insisting on paying by check etc.

You know what ticks me off? There are points that I have paid artists more than what’s agreed upon out of great respect for the artist! Now that scams like those Instagram ones are lurking about, the idea of doing that again now makes me feel slimy!

Sorry for everyone that got screwed hard. And I'm not an artist and this is probably very obvious of me...GET PAID IN FULL FIRST AND THEN DO THE COMMISSION!

I understand if you guys have different setups to when it comes to payment, but there are too many people in the world who have absolutely no problem fucking you over money wise.

This is just my personal opinion, but if I'm doing any kind of work outside of my actual job, then I need to be paid in full first. Because you're not going to pay me half and then when I need the other half you come up with every excuse in the damn book in order to keep your money.

It's amazing how putting the disclaimer "Payments are up Front" drastically reduces the number of bad clients. I don't have very many bad experiences with commissioners, but there was this one time a guy wanted me to animate an entire cartoon episode for them only to find out their budget was $40 for an entire animated episode. The guy was kinda rude too so I didn't really feel too bad turning 'em down.

Aside from that I got this one guy who's always trying to pull the whole "Once I make it big, I'll pay you back" garbage, and if that doesn't work, guilt tripping (which also doesn't work). I think the thing that pisses me off the most about this guy is that they're always getting people to spend months on projects, just for him to get bored of it and drop the project, completely wasting everyone's time cause you can't "make it big" with something that doesn't get finished.

It’s never “once” or “when”, it’s always IF one makes it big no matter what’s being claimed otherwise! Even if the project is done, it’s never absolute whether or not the completed work will gain enough traction to even get something out of it.

Don’t believe me?(asking rhetorically) Look at Disney this year!

You’re absolutely right. Even as a client, I know “Ifs” don’t pay bills!

My worst commission was a nightmare. I used to be a part of a large fandom when I was 17/18, they reached out to me on Tumblr based on seeing my fanart and they wanted me to draw some crackship art of two canon characters. The actual commission went great and he liked my work, but this guy would dm me as if we were best friends outside of commissions, I didn't know him at all. He would get possessive if I didn't respond to him and beg for me to talk, he would send me 5 - 10 messages one by one before I even had the chance to respond and he'd blow my dm's up with non-commission bs, back then I had too much patience so I explained to him that I was playing a game, and he asked what was I playing. Anyway, he bought the game for no reason but to follow me around the map (It was a multiplayer online game, so even if he didn't add me he could find my username around the game) It became a nightmare, I remember hiding from him as he saw me in the main spawn area once and having to hide in the towns until he lost sight of my username.

When he couldn't find me he'd go offline and begin dming me on Tumblr. A few days later her 'opened' up about hismelf, telling me how he used to be roommates with a black couple and that he saw them as inferior because of their race. So I called him disgusting and a racist, in which I stopped all contact with him and refused to do any commissions for him again. Because he knew my commission info he found my name on facebook and started abusing me over facebook for rejecting him, and threatening me. Since then I haven't even bothered advertising my commissions, it's been a few years since that ordeal but there is some freaks out there.

Oooookay. Now that’s a story! I dunno exactly how to respond to that!

Oh shit, I realized I misread “want to” as “have to”. I’ve gotten too used to dark humor lol