Operation: Commission Tom Preston

DISCLAIMER: This is not a call-out journal, it is a legitimate review of a commission experience.

Greetings internet. A majority of you know Tom Preston/Andrew Dobson as a notoriously obstinate and degenerative artist who likes to argue irrational views and give toxic advice to teenagers on Deviant Art. Back in The Great Giraffe Holocaust of '13 we took note of how he would ask for commissions, then spend hours writing journals and answering comments and possibly erasing invisible giraffes. We told him he should work on his commissions more, and he retorted that we weren't 'his boss' because we hadn't commissioned him.

It's impossible to prove whether or not the secret eraser is himself, his fans, or both, but we could prove he wasn't actually working on commissions. Myself, , , and a few other unhealthily obsessed EDiots devised a plan to pool our money together for a commission. None of us wanted to shell out a full 45 dollars for an original Andrew Dobson piece but with a group, the price was no more than lunch at Subway. The trick was to pick something subtle he'd be willing to draw, but challenging, or he'd just churn it out with no effort. That's how we decided on the Ridley and Samus piece you'll see.

We wanted to conduct this experiment over several topics. How is his general attitude toward commissioners? How does he handle revisions? But most importantly, how quickly does he produce them? Andrew states in his commission notes that without a deadline he'll go AT HIS OWN PAAAAAAACE! It's not that we were tricking him to produce the artwork slower, but that we wanted to know what his own pace for paid commissions actually was. (Contrary to that one comic he made, he did ask for money up front.) The entire conversation log along with progress pictures can be viewed here: i.imgur.com/tR55QpD.jpg

FOR THOSE SKIMMING, HERE'S THE IMPORTANT PART.
Four months and eight days. That is how long it took him to finish our commission after he accepted it and we paid him. An entire season had passed; it took from Winter to Summer. He makes a lot of excuses as to why, but we're here to debunk those.

"He has a lot of commissions piled up!" I too am a professional artist. I produce roughly 12 full-body full-color illustrations per month, on top of a few comic pages for my webcomic. For it to feasibly take him four months, he would need almost fifty commissions piled up ahead of ours. At that point, why would he not put people on a waiting list earlier? (Although I find it more likely that ours was the only one.)
"He has a comic to produce!" The pages he was posting during the time of our commission were mostly those copy-paste marvel critiques, which he barely had to draw himself. (Didn't he claim a few months before that he wouldn't use actual comics as examples because it would cause 'drama'?)
"He went out of town!" He told me after a couple months or so of waiting that he'd gone out of town briefly. Would have been nice if he'd said something before to his own customer.
"He got a new job!" Oh yes, the elusive 'new job' with a 'non-disclosure agreement' that means for some reason he can't give any clues about what the job is. (Protip: an NDA prevents you from talking about the specific content in your job, nothing more.) But that doesn't matter, because he already HAD a job, and that was to finish the commission he promised me. I still gave him money for a product and he still is responsible for it.

Flaws in Dobson's methods:
Dobson is cordial enough in his emails, so I mark his politeness factor as passing, but here are the problems with how he handles commissions, and the rebuttles to his possible excuses.

1: He does not list commissioners publically.
Most people show their commission 'slots' online, so others know who's next on the list and when to expect art. These slots are usually between 5-10 people at once, to prevent having say, 50 commissions piled up. Dobson would probably claim that he doesn't post slots for 'privacy' reasons, but he could easily list customers as 'anonymous' without including any details. Without slots, we have no evidence for how many commissions he really had (or didn't have) before ours, and no idea how long it might take him. Dobson does like to claim he has a huge amount of 'secret' commissioners that no one knows about, but all secrecy does is make it look like a lie. If the long list of secret commissions is delaying a product I paid for, I deserve to know how many there are ahead of mine.

2: He does not communicate regularly.
Generally, a commission should take about a month in my opinion. If it's going to take longer, that's when it should go on a queue. But if it is going to take a few months, the least an artist can do is contact the client once a month, or even every couple weeks for an update. He started out by sending us the sketch, but after a while I had to contact HIM most of the time if I wanted an update. I would wait a month, and send a message. The gap between when I asked him for a status update and when he gave me one seemed about reasonable for whatever additions he'd made to the image. What I'm saying is, I suspect he often hadn't worked on our commission until I checked in with him, then added a couple lines to it and sent it over. Maybe that's not the case, but without him voluntarily keeping up with me there's no way to tell!

3: He doesn't revise well.
When we received the first sketch we were struck by... mediocrity. That's what we expected of course, but we weren't sure how well he'd handle a request for a revision, so we asked for some changes. Mostly the perspective on her limbs. To his credit, he was not rude about it, but he never specifically replied either. Eventually he sent us a 'revised' image that had practically none of the changes we asked for, and instead several we didn't ask for, with no message about the revisions to clear up whether that was intentional. In my next email I even asked him about them again, but he still never addressed it. Rude? Well not for his standards. Evasive? Possibly.

Final Verdict:
TL;DR: You shouldn't commission him unless you want to pay 50 dollars up front and wait a third of a year while receiving minimal communication and having your requests for revisions practically ignored.

The reasons for this experiment were three fold: Curiosity, documentation for his potential clients, and to show Dobson something important. The teenagers and adult-children he panders to may provide a cushy sanctuary for his feelings, but they can't afford to pay his bills. The people who are able to give him actual paying work are us. The adults. The people who aren't blinded by his egotistical splendor. We are the ones that have the money and appreciation for art necessary for an artist to make a living, yet he constantly alienates us.

To Dobson, stop arguing about meaningless shit on your Deviant Art Journals and work on your fucking art. Stop weeding through comments for hours and work on your commissions. Stop making excuses to not inform people of things, then contradicting yourself later at your own convenience. You can include information about things WITHOUT violating anyone's privacy or airing out your dirty laundry easily. Stop making people wait months for a commission you could draw in less than a week while you fart around online and play Minecraft. When you have our money, we ARE the boss of you.

Yours Truly,
Baconmoose.