[Discussion] Worst Commissioner Experience?
What’s your WORST experience with a client as an artist?? Probably been asked a thousand times before but, honestly, I have a new story to tell every time. It’s so bad I’ve had to add specific changes to my TOS to combat stupid things I never thought I’d have to add lol.
(Please don’t name anyone though! Don’t want this to be a bullying or callout post, just a discussion to share stories!)
I’ve had my fair share of stalkers & obsessive clients, but I’ll start with my most recent:
I got a client wanting artwork for their adult “friend”. After discussion of options, who exactly would be paying kept getting tossed around like a hot potato. When they finally decided what they wanted and that the client would be paying for their friend, the friend wanted borderline nsfw of their character flashing..
I’m a SFW artist but dabble in some more suggestive art sometimes if I’m comfortable with it, it pays enough, and I trust the client, as well as knowing how old they are. It turns out the client was a younger minor, and I declined because I wasn’t comfortable supplying borderline nsfw artwork to someone so much younger than me (I’m 17 for reference). There was a lot of arguing and pushback because “it’s for my friend tho”, and I had to tell them that I can do it if their friend pays and it stays between us because I don’t want young minors involved in this sort of thing. Turns out the adult “friend” was very.. odd towards this client, and the client proceeded to just flat out vent to me about their friend. I did the best I could by staying professional but giving them advice to try and break off from their dangerous friend, and it just went even more downhill from there.
Client’s friend was very frustrated at me for not taking their order (the money was also way under my usual pricing), sh*t talking me in dms and insisting on dming me directly.. great! They were a lot nicer in dms but still pushed back. They explained they couldn’t use PayPal or Kofi but wanted to pay me in.. Robux gift cards ?? For context I USED to take Robux many years ago, but because commissions work is my literal job, I only take money.. they couldn’t fathom this for some reason. Eventually it ended in the friend (TW) Suic*de baiting me. Eventually they came crawling back to my dms but I turned them down again. They’re very active on discord to this day, and are very much alive.. it was for attention and to guilt trip me into giving them free work.
Client now wanted sfw artwork of their own fursona now, but couldn’t pay my usual rates. I was desperate for money at the time so I took it, but my god, this was by far my worst client.. They asked for so many tiny line changes on the SKETCH (they wanted literal sketch lines changed despite me telling them that it’s a sketch..) that I was STILL on the sketch stage an entire WEEK later, asking for changes daily and not letting me move on to lineart because “I need to think about it.” For every other commission I’ve done, the sketch is finished within a day. Eventually I got fed up and realised I was being paid under minimum wage for someone my age so I let them know.. they begged me to not cancel and offered a little more money to make up for it, agreeing with my terms of no more little changes. I took it because I needed the money, and the poor behavior continued. I ended up telling them No to any changes they asked for, as well as giving a deadline on when I’d finish it.. if I didn’t do that, I would’ve worked on this one low paying order for a month for sure.
They also kept asking for the chest size to be bigger. Not even kidding, it got to the point where it was becoming anatomically impossible, and I had to stop them..
The end result was.. awful for my standards, because they wouldn’t let me do anything. It looked like my artwork from 2-3 years ago it was that bad.. if they just let me do my thing it would’ve looked 100x better. They also kept flip flopping between singular LINES it was that bad.. they also did that thing of asking for changes and then going back on them because they didn’t like it.. awful. Thankfully they seemed to be happy with it and said they’d return for another, but no way in hell am I doing that lol. They’re on my black lists so I don’t forget who they are because god, what a hellish week and a half that was.. lost so much sleep stressing over this for such a small amount of money..