The Secret Furry Patrons Keeping Indie Artists Afloat
August 31, 2016 11:58 PM   Subscribe

Outside of a rarefied top tier, it can be extremely hard to make money in creative fields online. Writers are continually asked to work for pennies or, even worse, “exposure.” Artists may have it even worse. ... But there is still at least one online community that treats artists with respect and pays fair prices for original work — one community that artists can rely on when editors, publishers, and social networks make it more and more difficult to get paid. When it comes to commissioning original works of art, nobody can match the furries.
posted by hippybear (56 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
A good article.

I'm glad they put their money in getting a header.
posted by solarion at 1:26 AM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


Further commentary, as a furry:

- There are a lot of people who are shit about paying for pictures.

- There are a lot of people who are fastidious about paying, and usually give tips.

- There are a lot of artists and usually they drastically undercharge compared to industry rates because they haven't had experience in that realm. If you ever need a bespoke drawing of a character you have in mind (for whatever reason) I would recommend it, like the article says; people are very used to it, and being on a book cover (with sufficient credit, say) would be extremely welcomed.

- Pornography isn't so much that the furry fandom is more sexualized, but rather that people really want getting themselves drawn as an animal, and consequently a significant subset want said drawings to be sexual.

- "Your Character Here" auctions command surprisingly high prices for good artists.
posted by solarion at 2:50 AM on September 1, 2016 [6 favorites]


Wow, relevant to my interests... as I'm a freelance artist who does this. Not furries so much, but there are also people who are into slime people, insectoids, snake women, slug girls, plant babes, etc.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2dllB
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/AEww5
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/blrxG

I should move into furrydom and make some more cash, yo.
posted by ELF Radio at 3:13 AM on September 1, 2016 [8 favorites]


Patreon is also a great boon to artists like us. I just started, but there plenty of artists pulling in an extra $1,000/month for stuff they'd want to draw anyway.

As far as i know, the most insane runaway Patreon success story is Sakimichan, who makes... who makes... wait for it... wait for it...

...$27,000 every two weeks.

Let that sink in.
posted by ELF Radio at 3:25 AM on September 1, 2016 [6 favorites]


If I was still playing pen-and-paper RPGs as much as I was in my youth, I'd probably get my favourite characters drawn. And maybe some major moments from different campaigns. Hmm, maybe I will anyway.

How do you go about getting a commission done? The article didn't really say.
posted by Harald74 at 3:32 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


How do you go about getting a commission done? The article didn't really say.

Hop onto a website these artists frequent. Check if they're "open for commissions". If so, send them a message.

If you have ridiculous amounts of money you can skip the second step.
posted by solarion at 3:34 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's interesting how those on the lowest rung of the geek hierarchy seems to be the most decent folks (at least in this context).
posted by Harald74 at 3:39 AM on September 1, 2016 [11 favorites]


Hop onto a website these artists frequent. Check if they're "open for commissions".

OK, since you didn't spell it out for me, I guessed this might be DeviantArt.com and I was right. (Good, because I don't know any other websites like that...)
posted by Harald74 at 3:43 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm not a furry, and want to emphasize that thanks to hippybear I know it's not all about sex, but recent and apropos to the topic:
Sex Game Cancelled After Taking In Five Figures A Month On Patreon
The game, Breeding Season (NSFW obviously), was mentioned in a recent Patreon thread earlier this year a couple of months before the schism.

As someone who has fiddled around with programming genetic algorithms it's pretty impressive to see them integrated with hand-drawn illustration and made into a playable game. Many people on both the programming and creative sides of this really put in lots of hard work, maybe caring too much and causing the tension that broke everything up. I hope the disagreements get resolved, or that the project can be otherwise salvaged somehow.

(At least I think I hope? I'm a bit conflicted to be rooting for a slave breeding game, even a tongue-in-cheek one.)
posted by XMLicious at 3:45 AM on September 1, 2016


Yup, DeviantArt has everything. Everything.
posted by ELF Radio at 3:45 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Wait, what, really, "slime people" is a thing??? noooooo
posted by sammyo at 4:01 AM on September 1, 2016


sammyo,

Oh, yes. Yes.

http://chronorin.deviantart.com/art/Synthea-s-Garden-329977236
posted by ELF Radio at 4:03 AM on September 1, 2016


It's interesting how those on the lowest rung of the geek hierarchy seems to be the most decent folks (at least in this context).

Not really THAT big a shock — at its core, it makes sense that something built around the compulsive need to feel automatically superior to someone else would feature people who lack that unhealthy drive at the end.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:19 AM on September 1, 2016 [4 favorites]


I did a few sketches of lizards in fireman calendar poses for a weird joke. Maybe I should tap the Furry / David Icke fan crossover demographic.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:30 AM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


I had sort of picked up on the commissioned art aspect from earlier FPPs about furries, so this was an interesting read (and made me wish I had some artistic talent as well).
posted by Dip Flash at 4:52 AM on September 1, 2016


They seem to be very word-of-mouth-oriented, too. I have a couple Twitter bots that picked up a few furry followers early on, then within days, they ended up with a ton of furry-icon'd followers. I bet an artist that does a decent commission gets a ton of referrals.
posted by ignignokt at 5:59 AM on September 1, 2016


It's interesting how those on the lowest rung of the geek hierarchy seems to be the most decent folks (at least in this context).

I wonder if that's changing. There's Gamergate/anti-safe-space types with furry icons on Twitter, which may indicate some of them are in a secure enough place to be horrible to others?
posted by ignignokt at 6:02 AM on September 1, 2016


Sometimes reading things about internet culture makes me think I am destined to be shuffling around a world I cannot comprehend like Revivals in Transmetropolitan.
posted by vorpal bunny at 6:11 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


I wish this stuff was around when I was younger and poorer and had more spare time to draw.
posted by edheil at 6:46 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


Tumblr has a lot of artists offering commissions too - I've gotten a few pieces outta them.
posted by divabat at 6:54 AM on September 1, 2016


I have to admit that I eyerolled a bit at the notion that this is somehow a "secret", except maybe to people who still think of furries in the terms outlined by the notorious L&O episode. I've had some commissions of Pathfinder characters of mine done by artists that I follow on Tumblr, and have been mostly happy with the results; it scratches that itch that I used to be able to scratch myself in the now-defunct City of Heroes MMORPG, which had a truly awesome character creator. Artists have different strengths and weaknesses, and also different limits to what they'll do, particularly WRT sexual content, but it's still something to see for the first time a character that's been bouncing around in your head in one form or another for about twenty years.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:04 AM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


This is a good thing for artists but I worked with the spouse of an artist that had an anthropomorphic web comic and the folks that commissioned art were pretty demanding, it's not like it's easy work for big bucks and unlikely that many artists are getting rich. But, hey, there's been a few posts about story tellers and musicians working for "exposure" so getting real money for art is a net positive... (well except for, ugh, "slime people", oh my some things are just wrong ;-)
posted by sammyo at 7:11 AM on September 1, 2016


Interesting. I'm not a furry, but furries are the nerd subculture I'm most closely adjacent to (a lot of trans women who grew up online in the 90s and 00s put in some serious time in furry fandom, even if they're not still super-active there) and I guess I just assumed that all the others were like this too — that WoW players were out there commissioning WoW fanart in similar quantities, and Star Wars junkies were commissioning Star Wars fanart, and etcetera. Is that not the case?
posted by nebulawindphone at 7:33 AM on September 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


except maybe to people who still think of furries in the terms outlined by the notorious L&O episode

This might be depressing but I think you basically just said "except maybe to almost everybody". Our bubbles can be pretty small sometimes.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 7:36 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


I guess I just assumed that all the others were like this too — that WoW players were out there commissioning WoW fanart in similar quantities, and Star Wars junkies were commissioning Star Wars fanart, and etcetera. Is that not the case?

At least with these two examples (well, for sure for WoW, I'm guessing for Star Wars) you've got the game generating images of your character for you already (plus, you're kind of limited in customization options, and your character's clothing look changes dramatically with level progression). Plus blizzard licenses stuff like Figureprints.

It just seems totally different to me than a character that you've invented out of whole cloth (like furries, or tabletop role playing).

That being said -- WoW and Star Wars fanart are definitely things that happen.
posted by sparklemotion at 8:28 AM on September 1, 2016


Yeah, something like Star Wars is different because most fans don't identify as closely with any particular character, and there's a huge amount of art already available. The market for commissions is probably a lot smaller because even if people like looking at fanart there's no need for it to be personalized.

I'm not a furry, but I have commissioned art for a tabletop RPG before, which was a fun experience. In some ways it's analogous because your D&D character is an original creation and it's associated with you personally, but unlike a fursona it's more disposable: You'll play the game with a character for a while, but eventually that character will die or the story will end or you'll just get bored and move on. You might even have a bunch of characters simultaneously. Your characters are yours, but they aren't a part of your identity.

It sounds like the furry community is in a sweet spot for the commissioned art market, pretty much.
posted by a mirror and an encyclopedia at 8:49 AM on September 1, 2016


WoW players were out there commissioning WoW fanart in similar quantities, and Star Wars junkies were commissioning Star Wars fanart, and etcetera. Is that not the case?

I don't know about video games, but this is definitely a thing in media fandom. I still have the most charming sketch (bought in a charity fundraiser) of the Fourth Doctor and Romana from "City of Death" flying down into Paris, holding hands. I would expect that tumblr would only make this kind of patronage more popular, as it (obviously) emphasizes the visual and makes it easy to put your fanart out there.
posted by praemunire at 8:51 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


For a minute I read WoW as "Worlds of Wonder" the company that made Teddy Ruxpin and thinking ,wow people go to cons dressed as a robotic bear?
posted by boilermonster at 8:58 AM on September 1, 2016 [3 favorites]


My friends in comics assure me that at conventions, nearly all of them still get no end of highly specific and frequently perplexing commissions from many different, minutely atomized corners of fandom.

I, for one, have determined that I simply cannot survive another year without getting a pen-and-ink drawing of Pam Poovey, preferably dressed in Archer's old Lacrosse T-shirt and her granny panties, sitting on the Iron Throne with her legs loosely crossed, lava-balling style, while fixing the viewer with a steely-eyed, "just-fucking-try-it" look that's somewhere between the barmaid in Manet's A Bar at the Folies Bergère and Thomas Canty's Eric of Melnibone.

Spouse, pls remember for upcoming birthday, etc. KThxby!
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 8:59 AM on September 1, 2016 [8 favorites]


"with her legs loosely crossed, lava-balling style"

If any part of one leg is touching any part of the other leg then you ain't lavaballing right. Manspreading requires maximizing the distance between the legs.
posted by komara at 9:20 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Wait, what, really, "slime people" is a thing???

That cries out for a Donald Trump retort, but this is the wrong thread. I think it's so great that some artists somewhere are making money. May the universe bless them every one.
posted by Bella Donna at 9:24 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


fursona is the best new word I've learned in a long time.
posted by schmod at 9:28 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


A few thoughts here:

1) Contemporary MMOs have been allowing players to put together cosmetic outfits that sit 'over' your gear for a long time now, allowing your character in high-level gear to look like they're still a fresh-faced country bumpkin, or a town guard, or whatever else you're willing to spend the time and effort to put together. Players (myself included) go to great lengths to put together the "perfect" cosmetic set (more often, sets) and like to show them off: WoW and FFXIV and Star Wars examples abound.

2) Every game has a roleplay sub-community. Players (myself not included) establish detailed in-game personas with backstories, engage one another at length according to those personas, and invest a lot of time and effort crafting narratives around their character and the community.

3) Sometimes your mental image for your character doesn't quite fit what the game's capable of giving you. You might picture them having a different build than the only one the official game art cares to provide, or want to convey an aspect of their personality like how much they like rocks, or maybe you just like someone's art style and want to see how they handle your character.

4) There's absolutely a market there to do character commissions and I regularly see people's posts come across my Tumblr dashboard offering regular or "emergency" (help I gotta make rent/escape my parents' house/pay for dog surgery/etc.) commission slots available. I'm glad to see that people who may have gotten their start tracing video game manual art being able to get paid for their work, and everyone who I've seen posting their finished commissions is always so delighted by the end result that I hope it brings the artists joy too.

And finally as an addendum, a couple things I've had commissioned: a buff thri'kreen fighter for a D&D campaign done by Kaitlynn Peavler, a custom comic (NSFW language) about recycling from KC Green.
posted by majuju at 9:41 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


It's interesting how those on the lowest rung of the geek hierarchy seems to be the most decent folks

What's really going to bake people's noodles is the fact there are quite a few furries who are published authors, both writing furrycentric work and stuff that is not furry-oriented, and that at least some of them do very well for themselves. The geek hierarchy is a multiply-branching ouroboros.

In my time in SF/F I've met a fair number of people who identify as furries and nearly all of them have been lovely. I don't doubt there are assholes in the furry communities, just as there are everywhere. But I haven't met them.

I also honestly wonder if within the field they are looked upon as negatively as they used to be. I think the bullshit in the genre the last couple of years has reordered things a bit. Now, if you're not actively a bigoted piece of shit trying to troll the entire genre, you're basically all right. If that's actually the way it's sorting out, and it kind of looks to me like it is, I'm good with it.
posted by jscalzi at 9:47 AM on September 1, 2016 [11 favorites]


I am really, really grateful to furries on the basis that one of my favorite artists and writers ever got her start in part by selling art to furry communities. (She still goes to Anthrocon every year and everything.) She's one of the first places I heard about the furry community, and I swear to god she's been a better advocate for people like me who aren't furries but who do like animals and animal-based fiction a lot than anything else I've ever seen. She's also been going "*rolls eyes* dudes furries are people, they like animals, I like animals and I like to paint animals, we have a lot in common, Anthrocon is good people and I go every year" for ages, in very much the same way these artists describe.

man, if we somehow get more Ursula Vernons out of the furry fandoms' support for art, I think I would be beside myself with delight.
posted by sciatrix at 10:12 AM on September 1, 2016 [8 favorites]


OK, since you didn't spell it out for me, I guessed this might be DeviantArt.com and I was right.

Non-spelling-out intentional. Much as I am fond of it, some aspects of the fandom are genuinely weird and I didn't want to unintentionally throw you in the deep end.

I did a few sketches of lizards in fireman calendar poses for a weird joke. Maybe I should tap the Furry / David Icke fan crossover demographic.

...given sufficiently cute lizards I would probably buy this calendar and I know I'm not the only one.
posted by solarion at 10:34 AM on September 1, 2016


I've had quite a few of my D&D characters illustrated over the years! If you're thinking of getting a character drawn for the first time and yet the price tag's still a bit intimidating for the top artists, you might check out Fiverr.com as a starting point.
posted by The otter lady at 10:54 AM on September 1, 2016


My acquaintance made good money in high school doing real time illustrations for tabletop gaming groups - so you'd play for an afternoon and get a few pictures of your adventures, drawn by an artist as you role played. She also did furry commissions.

It's weird how long it took Hollywood to notice that nerds spend money likes it's going out of style.
posted by the marble index at 12:47 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


If you want to get a furry commission, the quickest way to find a ton of people who do this sort of thing is still Furaffinity. There are other furry sites out there with better design and programming, but FA has the one thing they don't: inertia. If you leave FA then you're leaving a major source of new fans and commissions.

There's a zillion artists on there, ranging from raw beginner to grizzled pro, with prices to match. Some will only draw g-rated stuff. Some will draw the craziest damn pieces of cartoon porn you can imagine. Some will do both. And of course different artists have different specialties - these links are taken from my favorites, which tend towards certain kinks. And to be honest I kept them to the mild side. I've seen some pretty crazy stuff on there. And I've drawn some pretty crazy stuff. Mostly posted on my other account, which I'm not gonna tell you the name of.

Almost all links in this comment are NSFW. Most will probably not show you anything if you don't have a FA account.

Oh yeah, and if any of you decide to get a fursona and start commissioning art, please don't be That Guy who takes a $5 commission and demands endless changes for free.
posted by egypturnash at 1:02 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Damn, the edit window is closed and I can't slip in a link to this picture of a lady Q*Bert I paid a friend to do when I was really drunk. (Some of the best commissions happen that way.)
posted by egypturnash at 1:09 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yeah, I occasionally do D&D or one-off character commissions for authors. They're not my bread and butter or anything (that's mostly backgrounds and book covers) but they're always fun. I did some furry commissions when I was starting out, too, but it seems like a community where either you're all in or no one knows who you are, and the thought of needing to maintain yet another tailored portfolio was just way too much. Still, my handful of interactions with that end of geekdom have been unfailingly pleasant.

(Ye gods, though, the thought of doing real time illustrations like marble index's friend just sounds insanely stressful; making sure all the particular bits of weaponry and armor were accurate on each character for a five or six person party in action scenes is not something I could do well in an hour.)
posted by tautological at 1:14 PM on September 1, 2016


I am really, really grateful to furries on the basis that one of my favorite artists and writers ever got her start in part by selling art to furry communities.

Knew who this was going to be before clicking the link, and while that's not uncommon, it still tickles me.
posted by radwolf76 at 1:19 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


palmcorder_yajna, it's not quite what you requested, but I got a copy of this art of Pam at Gencon signed by the artist, Megan Lara; dunno if she does commissions or not.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:43 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


The geek hierarchy is a multiply-branching ouroboros.

A "furoboros", one might say.
posted by haileris23 at 1:51 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


Furries are good people.
posted by heatherlogan at 2:15 PM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]


heatherlogan, is it just me or is that the *wrong* video in that story. I remember the chemical release at a furry convention--an acquaintance was there.
posted by clauclauclaudia at 2:42 PM on September 1, 2016


> Let that sink in.

I have brought shame to my family
posted by davelog at 2:45 PM on September 1, 2016 [5 favorites]


clauclauclaudia, I think you are looking at a "related stories" link. The article was about a furry convention sharing a hotel with a large group of newly-arrived refugees from Syria and pulling out all the stops to give the kids a good time.
posted by heatherlogan at 3:57 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


I commissioned a Twitter avatar from a local furry artist a while ago, and it was a really nice experience. I'm not a furry, but loved the idea of having an avatar who also looked like one of my cats, and had seen some of her work on her Twitter account.*

Happened to see that she was looking for new work at a time when I had $10 or $20 burning a hole in my pocket. I sent her a couple of reference photos, and she came up with something really cute!

* Somehow I seem to have ended up following a lot of furries? I don't know. Mostly branches off of a trans woman friend who writes about weird games, who I started following because of retweets from a friend I've known since junior high? The internet is full of fascinating synchronicity.
posted by epersonae at 5:11 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


heatherlogan, that is indeed the story I read, with the headline "Syrian Refugees Get Put Up in Same Hotel As Furries. Kids LOVE It." But the embedded video between the headline and the story was the other furry convention story. No matter. The furries I know are also good people. ;-)
posted by clauclauclaudia at 5:18 PM on September 1, 2016


epersonae, I've had the same "wait, when did my twitter feed become like 40% furries" experience, largely I guess because there's this large overlap with programmers, for some reason, and I started out by following a fair number of programmers.
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:41 PM on September 1, 2016


I have, at this point, commissioned 5 different artists to draw my fursona, with one commissioned more than once and also some freebies (fan art) by people who like and know me. It's fascinating to get different takes on my fursona, and it's fun to pay for artwork.

I nearly always try to pay a fair wage for the art I commission. Many of the artists ask way too little money for what I want, based on what I know about how much time they will spend. I think the average of what I have paid is about $75 for a full-body full-color shaded artwork. More than one artist I've had to insist that I pay that amount for their work, when they wanted to take much less.

But if you go into the commission artwork world that is outside of furry... I remember wanting to commission original artwork for a community theater production 25 years ago, and I contacted three artists I knew and they all wanted, like, $300 or more for simple line art that was easy to reproduce for posters or newspaper ads. For work that probably took much less time for a skilled artist. But with further research, this was sort of the basic beginning rate for such commissioned work for professional artists doing this kind of work.

I still think commissions from furry artists is a gigantic bargain, even with the rates I pay artists that are above what they are asking. If I strike a strong vein of employment income I would pay more to these same artists for their work because artists have skills I do not have and paying someone well for using those skills on my behalf should not be a question. I pay the plumbers I have called into my house plenty, I don't see why I should not pay artists something along the same scale.

It really pisses me off when furry artists post for commissions for fees like $10 or whatever for anything more than an incomplete pencil sketch out that isn't even refined. Because they are lowering the bar for ALL furry artists when it comes to what is expected to be paid for hard work. If a furry con badge, even at its most basic is a head and maybe shoulders, in full color, even without shading, takes 3 hours to complete? At $10, that's $3/hour. That's third world pay scale right there. And nobody with practiced skills should ever ask for that kind of wage.
posted by hippybear at 1:43 AM on September 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


solarion:

being on a book cover (with sufficient credit, say) would be extremely welcomed.

Am I right in thinking that, depending on your book's target audience, you'd have to pick your artist carefully? That, of course, depends on something else: how bad is the stigma surrounding the furry fandom today? Are they still seen as 'the cancer killing the internet'?
posted by BiggerJ at 3:33 AM on September 2, 2016


BiggerJ, given that furries aren't generally known as a whole for actually harassing groups or individuals and demonstrating active shittiness to other human beings, my impression is that they're now just sort of regarded as a quaint and silly corner of the Internet. When you have groups based around actual hatemongering fairly prominently visible on the internet, those are the ones generally regarded as "the cancer killing the internet" nowadays, it seems to me.
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:37 AM on September 2, 2016 [3 favorites]


Indeed. An it harm none, do what ye will.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:35 AM on September 3, 2016


Gemsonas (Steven Universe) and trollsonas (Homestuck) are super common commission requests in my part of fandom.
posted by divabat at 7:55 PM on September 5, 2016


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