Commissions are hard

When I had been creating BE and FMG animations for my deviantart page for a while, I started to wonder whether I should start offering to create animations on commission

Soon after that, I started up the strongandstacked.com website, so it wasn't until some months later that I actually got my first commission request.  And I got several more after that

At first I thought - great.  I'll be able to have my website going, and on the side I can make a little extra money with commission work!  And then I started to work on my first commission.

What I quickly came to realize is that commission work is very hard.  When I'm creating content for my website, I'm trying to please a broad swath of paying members of the site.  I'll get individual requests occasionally, and I will try to fill those when I can.  But in general I'm creating stuff in sort of free form fashion, rolling with it as long as it falls into the general "has BE or has FMG" category.

Commission work is a whole other animal.  When someone is commissioning you to create something, they usually have very exacting expectations on how it is going to turn out.  Rather than me starting work on an FMG animation and just playing around and rolling with it in a fluid way as it starts to get created, commission work is much more about trying to achieve a very specific set of requirements that have been laid out by the person who is buying the commission.

I want a woman who first experiences some FMG, but just for her upper arms. Then she gasps. Then her skin turns blue and her hair grows longer.  After that, she experiences a bit of BE.  Then she experiences FMG all over her body.  Then her clothes rip and shred.  But her shirt has to shred first.  And her shoes have to rip too.  But only after her pants...

What I've gone through with commissions sometimes is a very long back and forth process where I will create a draft animation or a set of draft images, send those to the customer, then get feedback on what they want changed.

I've found this to be an utter productivity killer as far as work for my website goes.  Often when I've taken on commission work, the work I do for strongandstacked.com grinds to a screeching halt.

That's why I've tended to shy away from commission work now. I just don't have the bandwidth to engage in that kind of work.  Because as I said, it usually involves a lot of back and forth and tweaking and communication and it just takes a very, very long time.

There have been exceptions.  The best kind of commission work for me, the kind that makes it so my productivity for strongandstacked.com doesn't take a hit, is the kind where someone commissions me for something that isn't too hard for me to do and something that I can actually go ahead and use on my website.

Some of the breast implant BE comics on strongandstacked.com fall into that category.  Someone commissioned me to do them and said I could go ahead and use them on the site as well.  So it was a win win.  And the requirements they had weren't too demanding. They had a general request for the way the story would flow and for certain kinds of phrases to be used.  Beyond that, the guidelines were pretty general. So that worked out really well for me.

Its really only those kinds of commissions that I can take on.

I've done commission work for a couple of other websites in the past.  And those were very, very hard for me.  I remember submitting several draft animations and they were always "not quite right".  Again - it just stopped me dead in my tracks as far as creating content for my own site goes.  So I don't generally do that kind of commission work any more

All of that has made me very loose in the requirements I give to people that I commission to do work for my site.  When I ask stone3d to do something, I give him very general guidelines and I really let him run with those and be creative and do things the way he wants.  I know the pain of having to fulfill very exacting commission requirements and I don't want to inflict that on anyone.

I can understand why people want to do that - you pay for a  commission and you want it done in a certain way.  And for people who don't have to crank out content for their own website week after week, they may have time to devote to slowly crafting a commission that meets a very exacting set of requirements.

I just don't have time to do that.  At least not if I want to keep creating content for strongandstacked.com in anywhere near a timely fashion.