I'm a Bay Area beast, from Santa Cruz originally. My three aspects are Werewolf, Storm Dragon, and Pitbull-Coyote coydog, in rough ascending order of manifestation frequency. I'm a gay transmale, fully disabled as far as Real Work is concerned but doing my best to stay alive, a metalhead, a drug user (though not so much as of late due to the manifestation of physical disabilities,) a Camaro driver, a devotee of Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and New Model Army... hell, I dunno. I never know what to say in this sort of thing. I'm a big asshole who does what he likes, which, for some reason, appeals to some people. Oh well. C'est la belle mal vie.
Commission Stuff:
I just acquired two new Bristol pads, 9x12 and 16x20, plus three packs of canvasboard, so let's get working, shall we? Prices entirely dependant on what you ask for but usually fall within the range of $15 for a single-figure sketch on my less-nifty 8x11 paper up to $75 or more for an 11x17 or larger acrylic painting. Drawings on that size paper will start at a minimum of $25 but will not likely go too far above $40 except in the cases of multiple characters, complex and difficult scenes, and so forth. My specialties by far are dragons, demons, werewolves and other bete noire (vampires not included.) Ugly things are fun but I can also do attractive things, believe it or not. Outside horror, I draw a lot of predators and metal musicians, guitars and knives, that sort of thing. Morphic and nonmorphic are both covered though lately mostly it's been nonmorphic animals and weres rather than morphs in my personal work.
I have no squicks (I will not draw shota but I'm too cynical to be 'squicked' by it, per se) but I will warn you now, I'm 95% asexual; adult work is really, really, REALLY not my focus area. I can try to pull it off; I am occasionally more or less successful in these attempts (see the cheetah-woman thing;) this does not happen often enough for me to dispense with this disclaimer.
Payment is half up front, half on completion. Other schemes can be negotiated for more expensive stuff if necessary. I do not, believe it or not, like having people pay up front, and here's why: I never know what the final price is going to be before a piece is finished. Unexpectedly something I thought would be simple might take me three weeks to complete, and suddenly $25 is nowhere near adequate compensation for that time, you know? So while my quotes are usually fairly accurate, they aren't always and they're only occasionally 100% correct, so I hate to have people pay in full only to have it turn out that they've either under- or overpaid.
(Speaking of which, as I have had a 'falling out' with the bank I used to use, I can no longer accept checks. PayPal and cash at your own risk; if you can only use the latter, we'll have a talk about sending money safely.)
My commissioning process goes pretty much as follows. You contact me and tell me what you want, in general terms. I tell you whether or not I feel I can handle that right now based on my current inspiration level/workload, and if so, I ask you to get into specifics. Lots of them, but only relevant ones. Proverbially, toe descriptions only matter if their feet are visible. Once you've done that and I've blocked out how I think the piece will come out, including discussing with you media and size/composition of flat (there's a huge difference between 9x12 acrylic on canvasboard and 11x17 watercolour pencil on Bristol, after all) if you didn't previously specify those, I'll quote you a price, and, if there are people ahead of you in my queue (which fluctuates randomly based on inspiration, availability of relevant drugs, caveat, whim, et cetera, so do not assume your place in it necessarily means anything) an ETA. Regardless, when I do start expressly working on your piece, I'll e-mail you to let you know I've begun.
Elapsed time from that point on varies wildly. That's why I give time quotes, not timelines, because I'm incapable of sticking to a timeline or a deadline. In fact, if one exists, I seem to subconsciously go out of my way to violate it. Which is, of course, completely unfair to the consumer, so I don't do that anymore. Instead I just look at my current behaviour and guess how long a given project will probably take me. I will warn you all now, I can be a bit erratic. There are times when I go completely incommunicado for two weeks or more. Rest assured, in those times, I *am* working on, or at least dilligently tackling whatever issue has come up in order to free up time to allow myself to work on, your piece. It's just that I'm too shellshocked to be social or on call at the same time. If I disappear at any point in the process, it does not mean I've decided to ignore you; it means I've either forgotten the computer exists for a couple of days or there have been ripples in my life as there frequently are.
Anyhow. Once I finish the sketch portion, I will scan it and show it to you for approval. Know that this is your one chance to examine it for inaccuracies and things you don't like, because once you give me the okay here and I move on to colouring, there is no turning back. I am not redrawing an entire 24" painting because you didn't 'notice' some minor flaw somewhere. And I'll only do a certain amount of redraws before they start costing you normal sketch prices; the number depends on the complexity of the subject. Minor revisions are basically unlimited, but if holes start forming in the paper I'm gonna have to ask you to settle for what you've got.
After the sketch portion is finished, I either clean and finalise it for a sketch commission or colour it as appropriate. I will occasionally pause and ask for approval at relevant points in longer colouring processes, especially with paintings.
At the end, I will as a formality ask for final approval. In reality whether you like it or not you've bought it, but I do also want to be sure you like it before I turn it over to you, especially if what you don't like is something I can fix. Once final approval is given, I'll tell you what the full final price is upon consideration of labor, time, unexpected material costs, and so forth (this rarely increases the price much and sometimes decreases it) and will wait for the arrival of the second half of payment. Once I get it, I'll give you your piece.
If you buy a drawing on large paper or a painting, you're almost invariably buying the original, if only because I can't scan anything bigger than 9x12, so keep that in mind.
Final Note: Gibbous Waning is a business that produces art, custom and otherwise. Don't try to pull anything with me that you wouldn't pull in a store. Thank you.
