i know we have a growing community of roleplayers within this fandom (both affiliated and independent ones) so i wanted to make a post highlighting something i’ve been seeing a lot of
do not use artist’s work on your blog without their permission
even if you post a disclaimer saying that the art used on your blog isn’t yours, even if you include credit in your post… neither of those things give you a free pass to repost people’s art. artists put a lot of time and effort into their work, so don’t use it on your blog without their express permission!
that includes: using their art on your mobile theme, using it in your sidebar, making edits of their art, reblogging reposts of their art, and cropping their art to make icons.
i have a lot of artist friends in this fandom and it makes a lot of them uncomfortable to find out people have been using their art without their knowledge or permission! if you don’t have permission to use someone’s art on your blog, then message them to check if they’re okay with it – and if they’re not okay with it, then don’t.
I’m going to give this a pretty hypocritical answer because I’m behind on a couple commissions thanks to some mental health problems (though the two customers are aware of this and have been very patient, bless them in a very non-southern sense), but honestly– the artist should have been keeping you up-to-date from the start?
Things like pose and expression are able to be fixed in the preliminary sketch. Did they just crank out rough-to-finished without keeping you in the loop and getting your input? I wouldn’t consider myself the most communicative, but (in the case of half+full bodies) I’ll always send a rough sketch, lineart, and preliminary final to make sure it’s everything the commissioner wanted– if it’s not what they like after I show them three separate WIPs, then it’s kind of on them for not saying “hey, I don’t like that expression”, you know?
So if they didn’t give you that measure for what sounds like a full-body piece, then I think you have every right to say, “Look, I appreciate the effort, but this isn’t what I asked for.” It’s their mistake for putting all that effort into the wrong thing. If I’m at work and have to put together a new shelf of product and wind up putting together the completely wrong aisle, all that effort isn’t going to let me off the hook because the job I was supposed to do still hasn’t been done.
So yeah. Don’t be like super aggressive about it but do point out that it’s not what you wanted. It’ll be okay.
