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Yay it's 3am and I can't sleep. Bored out of my skull, don't want to work any more, so I share stories of the strangeness that I regularly encounter.
As many of you know I make costumes, plushes, and other fuzzy things as my main business. However as you may not know I also draw. The drawing is a hobby, not an occupation. I do not have what it takes to make real money drawing. The people who do have my admiration, but they're also a little bit crazy, imho. It is HARD, and the competition is insane.
Anyhow, lately I've been doing this thing where I offer a huge discount on the price of a drawing if you let me decide all the fiddly details. So instead of getting a list of exactly how they want it a mile long and having to go back and forth with sketches forever until they're happy, they just say what species and what color palette they want, and I draw it, and present the finished product, no revisions allowed. (It's a bit more involved than that, but I'll spare you the details.)
I do this because it's fun. It doesn't pay worth beans, I haven't sat down and timed myself, but if I'm making more than $3 an hour on these things I'd be shocked. But I enjoy them, so I usually have a few on my plate at any given moment.
That's the TL-DR background. The actual story:
I did a particular deal where if you wanted a dragon you could get a series of drawings, showing your dragon as an egg, hatching, a baby, a child, an adult, and an ancient dragon. Fun stuff, I love doing those. So this gal I sort of vaguely know from livejournal commissions a set of them. In her original message she emphasizes rather over-much that she wants to be sure these drawings are clean. They need to be child-safe. No genitals showing. She wants to be able to show them to her daughters, so they absolutely must be clean.
I'm honestly a little puzzled by this, because 99% of my work is completely, utterly, absolutely clean and child-safe, and even the last 1% isn't exactly porno. I think there's one little doodle that's kind of steamy that I did for my husband in there, and a pin-up sketch, both of which show nothing, and a few nudes that show nipples, that's pretty much it. But eh, whatever, maybe she's been burned by somebody on this subject before. I can recall once asking for a tasteful nude and getting a hilarious full-frontal comedy-pinup instead, gigantic hooters and all. (Which honestly I didn't mind because the laugh I got out of it was totally worth the price!) So whatever, it happens, I won't be insulted. So I promise that yes, they'll all be clean, no worries, and start drawing.
So the egg was no problem, but when I posted the hatching one, she commented and reminded me that the next one needed to not show any genitals. I bristled a bit at that. Hadn't I promised her they would be clean? Wasn't my word good enough? But okay, fine, whatever, I calmed myself down enough to respond politely that yes, the next one would be clean. Which it was. And which was her response when she saw it, that she was glad the genitals weren't showing.
The one after that she said she liked it, with no mention of "genitals", so I thought we were good. But the following drawing, her only comment was that she was happy I had posed it so that the wings hid the genitals. *facepalm* I told her, a bit sharply, that being a reptile this thing HAD no external genitals to hide, and could she please quit talking about this all the time? I was getting kind of uncomfortable at this point, tbh. I have never discussed genitals so much in my life. It was creeping me out. Why was this person so obsessed? I've never met anybody who expended so much effort thinking about genitals who wasn't trying to get me to draw porn! The whole thing was pretty darn creepy.
The problem was that by the time I realized what a nut this girl was, I'd already drawn and inked the final drawing, it just needed color. And the final pose I'd chosen was, well... it was the dragon rearing up on its hind legs and roaring. As seen from the front. Its (completely genital free) crotch area was visible! No wings over it, no top-down pose to hide it, nothing at all to cover the shameful, awful, mind-scarring sight... of nothing at all. I mean have you ever looked at a reptile's underside? There's nothing there! With snakes you often can't even tell where the genital opening is hidden at all! And not being obsessed with the subject I hadn't even had the thought cross my mind that showing a blank crotch could be construed as somehow obscene.
I still rather hoped for sanity, I have to say. I hoped that when she saw that the thing was effectively sexless she'd give up her weird obsession with its genitals and just be happy with the art.
Sadly this was not to be, for when she saw the final picture, she told me she didn't like it, and she wanted me to draw it over in a different pose. To my great relief she did not rabbit on about its genitals, but I'm absolutely certain that's what she didn't like about the pose.
Thankfully it's spelled out in the terms of these things that there are no revisions, so I told her she could take it or leave it, but I wasn't doing it over. She took it, and that's the last I've heard from her. Thank heavens!
Dunno if you call that sucky, quite, but it was one of the more bizarre transactions I've had.
As many of you know I make costumes, plushes, and other fuzzy things as my main business. However as you may not know I also draw. The drawing is a hobby, not an occupation. I do not have what it takes to make real money drawing. The people who do have my admiration, but they're also a little bit crazy, imho. It is HARD, and the competition is insane.
Anyhow, lately I've been doing this thing where I offer a huge discount on the price of a drawing if you let me decide all the fiddly details. So instead of getting a list of exactly how they want it a mile long and having to go back and forth with sketches forever until they're happy, they just say what species and what color palette they want, and I draw it, and present the finished product, no revisions allowed. (It's a bit more involved than that, but I'll spare you the details.)
I do this because it's fun. It doesn't pay worth beans, I haven't sat down and timed myself, but if I'm making more than $3 an hour on these things I'd be shocked. But I enjoy them, so I usually have a few on my plate at any given moment.
That's the TL-DR background. The actual story:
I did a particular deal where if you wanted a dragon you could get a series of drawings, showing your dragon as an egg, hatching, a baby, a child, an adult, and an ancient dragon. Fun stuff, I love doing those. So this gal I sort of vaguely know from livejournal commissions a set of them. In her original message she emphasizes rather over-much that she wants to be sure these drawings are clean. They need to be child-safe. No genitals showing. She wants to be able to show them to her daughters, so they absolutely must be clean.
I'm honestly a little puzzled by this, because 99% of my work is completely, utterly, absolutely clean and child-safe, and even the last 1% isn't exactly porno. I think there's one little doodle that's kind of steamy that I did for my husband in there, and a pin-up sketch, both of which show nothing, and a few nudes that show nipples, that's pretty much it. But eh, whatever, maybe she's been burned by somebody on this subject before. I can recall once asking for a tasteful nude and getting a hilarious full-frontal comedy-pinup instead, gigantic hooters and all. (Which honestly I didn't mind because the laugh I got out of it was totally worth the price!) So whatever, it happens, I won't be insulted. So I promise that yes, they'll all be clean, no worries, and start drawing.
So the egg was no problem, but when I posted the hatching one, she commented and reminded me that the next one needed to not show any genitals. I bristled a bit at that. Hadn't I promised her they would be clean? Wasn't my word good enough? But okay, fine, whatever, I calmed myself down enough to respond politely that yes, the next one would be clean. Which it was. And which was her response when she saw it, that she was glad the genitals weren't showing.
The one after that she said she liked it, with no mention of "genitals", so I thought we were good. But the following drawing, her only comment was that she was happy I had posed it so that the wings hid the genitals. *facepalm* I told her, a bit sharply, that being a reptile this thing HAD no external genitals to hide, and could she please quit talking about this all the time? I was getting kind of uncomfortable at this point, tbh. I have never discussed genitals so much in my life. It was creeping me out. Why was this person so obsessed? I've never met anybody who expended so much effort thinking about genitals who wasn't trying to get me to draw porn! The whole thing was pretty darn creepy.
The problem was that by the time I realized what a nut this girl was, I'd already drawn and inked the final drawing, it just needed color. And the final pose I'd chosen was, well... it was the dragon rearing up on its hind legs and roaring. As seen from the front. Its (completely genital free) crotch area was visible! No wings over it, no top-down pose to hide it, nothing at all to cover the shameful, awful, mind-scarring sight... of nothing at all. I mean have you ever looked at a reptile's underside? There's nothing there! With snakes you often can't even tell where the genital opening is hidden at all! And not being obsessed with the subject I hadn't even had the thought cross my mind that showing a blank crotch could be construed as somehow obscene.
I still rather hoped for sanity, I have to say. I hoped that when she saw that the thing was effectively sexless she'd give up her weird obsession with its genitals and just be happy with the art.
Sadly this was not to be, for when she saw the final picture, she told me she didn't like it, and she wanted me to draw it over in a different pose. To my great relief she did not rabbit on about its genitals, but I'm absolutely certain that's what she didn't like about the pose.
Thankfully it's spelled out in the terms of these things that there are no revisions, so I told her she could take it or leave it, but I wasn't doing it over. She took it, and that's the last I've heard from her. Thank heavens!
Dunno if you call that sucky, quite, but it was one of the more bizarre transactions I've had.
Nothing but genital.
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