How to sell art commissions online without getting burned

You quoted $150 for a half-body, they said yes, and eleven days later you're on the fourth version because "the hair isn't quite right" and they've now mentioned it's for their company's website. You've made maybe $9 an hour and you haven't been paid yet.

Three mechanics fix nearly all of it, and they all happen before you draw a line. A brief form that the client fills in, with references, so "just do whatever you think" is never the starting point. A revision policy stated as a number, two rounds at sketch and one at colour, with a price for anything after. And staged payment, half before you start and half before the full-resolution file leaves your hands, because the watermarked preview is the only real hold you'll ever have.

Every commission horror story you've read is one of those three missing.

The brief form, and the questions that change the price

Stop taking briefs in DMs. Not because DMs are unprofessional, but because a conversation has no fields and a form does.

Seven questions, and each one prevents a specific disaster:

1. What am I drawing? Character, pet, couple, scene. Plus references, two to five images, required not optional. A description without references is a request to read someone's mind.
2. What's it for? Personal, an avatar, a print for a wall, a book cover, a company's marketing. This is the price question dressed as a logistics question.
3. What size and resolution? An avatar at 1000 px and a poster at 300 dpi are different jobs. Getting this after you've finished means redrawing.
4. What's the deadline, and is it hard? A birthday is a hard deadline. "Whenever" is not, and should be priced and queued accordingly.
5. What should I definitely not include? The most underrated question on the list. People have strong feelings about specific things and they rarely volunteer them.
6. Style reference from my own work. Which of my pieces is closest to what you want. This one sentence prevents the client who wanted your old style and got your new one.
7. Anything else I should know? Where the useful stuff arrives.

Then add one line under the form: "I'll reply within 48 hours with a quote and a slot. Nothing's booked until the deposit's paid."

The second question is the money one. A $150 personal-use character illustration used as a company logo is a different job at a different price, and if you don't ask, you find out when you see it on their packaging. Ask before quoting, every time.

Price the tiers, publish them, and price commercial separately

Publish a price list. Not "DM for prices". The DM-for-prices approach filters out the serious people and keeps the hagglers, which is the exact opposite of what you want.

A structure that works, with the numbers being yours rather than mine:

Tier	Typical hours	Price	Rate
Bust, flat colour	3 to 4	$90	$26/hr
Half body, rendered	6 to 9	$180	$24/hr
Full body, rendered	10 to 14	$290	$24/hr
Full illustration with background	18 to 25	$480	$22/hr
Extra character	60% of base
Simple background	+$60
Detailed background	+$140

Work out your own by timing three finished pieces honestly and dividing. Almost every artist discovers their rendered half-body takes eight hours rather than the five they'd have guessed, which turns a $150 price into $19 an hour before you count the messages.

Then handle commercial use as a separate, explicit line:

Prices above are for personal use. Commercial use, meaning anything used to promote or sell a product, service or business, is quoted separately and typically starts at 2.5x the personal rate.

Two and a half times is a starting point, not a rule. What actually sets it is how the image gets used and for how long, which is the same set of variables photographers use: where, how long, what territory, and whether it's exclusive.

Don't be shy about this and don't apologise for it. A business that's going to put your illustration on its homepage for three years is getting something worth far more than $180 to them, and every commercial client expects the question.

Revisions, expressed as a number

"A couple of revisions" means whatever the client thinks it means, which is more than you think it means.

Write it as a count, tied to stages:

• Sketch stage: two rounds of changes, included. This is where changes are cheap and where you want them.
• Line art or flats: one round, included. Composition is locked at this point.
• Rendered stage: small fixes only. Colour tweaks, a detail, a highlight.
• After final delivery: $35 per round, or your equivalent.
• A fundamental change after sketch approval is a new commission at 50% of the original price.

Then enforce the stages by approval. The client approves the sketch in writing, and once they have, the composition is decided. If they come back at rendering wanting the pose changed, that's a new commission and you say so calmly, quoting the line they already agreed to.

The revision policy isn't there to protect you from difficult clients. It's there so the reasonable ones know when to speak up, and they almost always do it at the sketch stage if you tell them that's the moment.

One practical addition. Send the sketch at a slightly reduced size with a watermark. Not out of suspicion, but because a low-resolution sketch focuses feedback on composition instead of on details that don't exist yet.

Staged payment, and the file you don't send

The structure that works for almost everyone:

Small pieces, under about $200. Full payment up front, non-refundable once you've started the sketch. Say that in the confirmation.

Mid-size, $200 to $600. Fifty per cent to book the slot, fifty before the full-resolution files are delivered.

Large pieces and commercial work. Thirty per cent to book, forty at sketch approval, thirty on delivery. The middle payment is the one that protects you on long jobs, because a client who goes quiet after approving a sketch has already paid for the work you've done.

The mechanic that makes this hold up: the client sees a watermarked, lower-resolution preview of the finished piece. The full-resolution file with no watermark goes out when the balance clears. That's it. It's not aggressive, everyone in this trade does it, and every client who's commissioned art before expects it.

Be clear about the deposit being non-refundable, and be clear about what it buys. "The deposit holds your slot in the queue. It's non-refundable once I've started, because I've turned down other work for that week." Then honour the other side of it: if you have to cancel, you refund in full and you refund fast.

Setting up staged payment on a shop page is mechanically simple. List the deposit as its own item at its own price, and the balance as a second item, and send the second link when the piece is ready. Getting paid for a custom order covers the wording for the awkward middle bit, and taking a deposit before you start covers asking for money from someone who hasn't seen you work yet.

Manage the queue, publicly

The reputational damage in commissions almost never comes from bad art. It comes from a piece promised in March and delivered in September.

Take three slots at a time. Not twelve. Three. Open more when one closes.

Publish the queue. A pinned post or a page with first names or initials and status: sketching, rendering, waiting on client feedback. It takes two minutes to update and it stops every "any update?" message before it's sent.

Give a range, not a date. "Two to three weeks from deposit" is honest. "Friday" is a hostage.

Say when you're closed. Commissions closed until 14 September is a completely acceptable sentence and it protects the work you've already taken.

Have a rule for the client who goes quiet. Two follow-ups, a week apart, then the piece goes on hold and the deposit stands. Write it in the confirmation. Clients disappearing mid-commission is common and it's rarely malicious, it's just life, and having a rule means you don't have to decide while annoyed.

There's a related problem worth naming. Roughly speaking, for every ten people who message asking about prices, two will pay a deposit. That's normal and it isn't a reflection on you. It does mean that answering price questions manually is a poor use of an afternoon, which is the whole argument for a published price list and a form.

Worked example: Sam, Seattle, three slots and a waiting list

Sam does character illustration, mostly for people who play tabletop games and want their character drawn. Half body rendered at $180, full body at $290, and they open three slots roughly every three weeks.

Their timings, measured rather than guessed: a rendered half-body is 7 hours 20 minutes on average across the last fifteen. At $180 that's $24.50 an hour before the admin, and the admin, the brief, the messages, the invoicing and the delivery, is about 50 minutes per commission. So it's more like $21.80.

Enquiry to payment: about ten enquiries per opening, two to four deposits. The rest ask, think about it, and drift. Sam stopped taking that personally in year two.

The two changes that mattered:

They moved from "DM for prices" to a published price list with the tiers and the commercial line on it. Enquiries dropped by about half and deposits went up, because the people who message now already know the number.

And they started taking 50% up front after a $290 full body where the client vanished at the rendering stage, having approved the sketch, and never came back. Nine hours of work, no money. That single loss paid for the deposit policy for the rest of their career.

The commercial line has earned them two jobs. A board game publisher wanted the same half-body work for card art, and Sam quoted $520 with a three-year licence for print and digital in one territory. They paid it in a day, which told Sam the number had been too low.

Across in Lagos, Iyanu runs the same shape with two price lists: naira for Nigerian clients and USD for international ones, because the exchange rate moves enough that a fixed conversion loses money within a month. The international side is the bigger earner and it's entirely dependent on card payments working, which is worth understanding before building a business on it.

Files, licences and the AI question

What you deliver. State it in the confirmation. A PNG at the agreed resolution, plus a JPEG, plus any variants you promised, delivered by link. The layered source file is not included and is priced separately if someone wants it, usually at a significant premium, because a client with your PSD can edit your work forever.

Keep the files for a year. Someone will lose theirs. Charge a small retrieval fee after twelve months or don't, but decide.

The licence line. One sentence at the bottom of the confirmation. "Personal use: you can post, print and use this for yourself. You can't use it to promote or sell a product or service, and you can't resell or relicense it. Credit appreciated but not required."

Credit and portfolio rights. State that you'll post the finished piece in your portfolio unless they ask you not to. Some clients have reasons, usually a surprise gift or an unreleased project, and a private commission surcharge is a reasonable thing to offer.

AI. Clients will ask whether you use generative tools, and some will send you AI-generated images as reference. Have a one-line answer written down, whatever your position is, and put it on the commission page. Being vague about it in 2026 costs you the clients who care in both directions. If you don't want AI reference images, say so on the form, because otherwise you'll get them.

The money, and its one real weakness

On bank transfer, cash, WhatsApp, Instagram DM, Telegram, email and phone orders, Sailo never touches the money and takes nothing at all. Card is 1–3% of the goods, taken after discount and excluding delivery and tax, so 90 cents on a $180 half-body, and it needs a Stripe account that Stripe has cleared for charges. That clearance depends on where your business is registered, which is a genuine gate for artists in some countries and no obstacle at all in others.

For commission work specifically, card is usually worth it, because your clients are strangers on the internet in other countries and a bank transfer across borders is expensive, slow and often refused. At four commissions a month averaging $220, that's $880 of card volume and the subscription is 2.3% of it, on top of Stripe's own cut.

Here's the honest limitation, and it's specific to digital work. The money on a card sale lands in your own Stripe account, because Sailo never holds it. That's good, and it also means a chargeback is entirely between you and Stripe, and nobody at Sailo can contest it for you. A client who receives a full-resolution file and then charges back leaves you with nothing but the argument. Your defence is the paper trail: the brief form, the written sketch approval, the delivery message, and the licence line. Keep them in one folder per commission and you'll usually be fine. What to do about a chargeback covers what actually persuades.

If you also sell finished work as physical prints, that's a different set of problems entirely and how to sell art prints online covers the editions, the sizing and the packing.

What to do next

Time your next commission properly, start to finish, including messages. Not an estimate. A stopwatch, or at least a note of when you started and stopped each session. Almost every artist finds the real number is 30% to 50% above what they'd assumed, and that number is the reason your prices feel wrong.

Then write your brief form, seven questions, and put it behind a link you can paste into any DM. Write your revision policy as two numbers. Write your licence as one sentence. That's an hour of work and it's the difference between a commission business and a series of favours with money attached.

Open three slots, publish the price list, and say no to the fourth person until one closes. The waiting list is the product.