if I may ask, how have you been getting commissions? Like how are you promoting them?
Just any tips because I've been meaning to open commissions again but I don't know how to market myself
Thank you!
Getting Commissions
What helps me most :00
Most of how I get commissions comes down to visibility + making it easy to hire me ! I try to post as often as I realistically can, not necessarily every day, just whenever I’m able, staying active keeps your art in front of people, as much as its annoying to hear it Xb
Having a clear, eye-catching commissions post helps a LOT too, i got way more commissions once I got my sheet all figured out. My main one is animated, but it doesn’t have to be. Even something clean, pretty, and easy to read goes a long way (Make sure you tag your niche audience.)
I also highly recommend cross-posting your work across multiple socials if you can--I post on Tumblr, TikTok (my biggest/most active audience), Instagram, and occasionally Bluesky. Different platforms reach different people, so it helps a lot with visibility :)
Join in on things you genuinely enjoy ! Events, fandoms, challenges, art trades, collabs, contests, etc. Art is a community, and being part of it helps people know you and your work :) Talk to other artists, support others, and don’t be afraid to reach out for collabs or trades. There’s an audience for EVERYTHING, and participating in what you love helps them find you!
I also post past commissions, art trades, and finished work often ! When people regularly see what you make, they’re more likely to think of you when they need art.
Tags help a ton as well--I use commission tags, but also audience tags like D&D, fantasy, OCs, character art, etc, etc, so the right people can find me !
I know everyone hates hearing it, but a lot of it is consistency. Keep posting, keep showing your work, and things should come to you :))
Posting some of writing here instead of just on Unvale ^^ read TW and tags please !
1.) Soft
Tw : body horror, psychological horror, body dysmorphia, trauma (implied ), hunger / starvation themes, self-alienation, death mention (past)
People were so soft. All wool and cashmere, felted warmth and pliant edges. Even the cruel ones seemed made of yielding things, wrapped in skin that remembered every touch. Aurien thought this often, though never aloud.
Not that he had much experience in that regard outside of himself, Haiki, and the occasional careful touch from Pearl before her death. Even those touches had begun to blur at the edges, dissolving into the fog where so many of his memories lived. Time had a habit of eating gentleness first.
Still, people were soft.
Not merely in temperament or emotion, though they seemed built of that too. Tenderness surfaced quickly in some of them, panic quicker still, grief quickest of all. Their feelings rose so visibly it fascinated him, as if the body could not bear to keep secrets for long.
But he meant softness in the simpler sense. Touch. The plain mechanics of flesh beneath pressure, skin giving way like wet clay with less drag and more grace. Mouldable, impressionable, eager to keep the shape of whatever had claimed it.
It dented around rings and pebbles and fingertips. Fabric seams pressed little roads into shoulders and hips that lasted for hours. Lips were worried raw beneath blunt teeth, crescents left in palms where fists had clenched too long. A life could be read in the temporary marks a person carried.
A man sleeping against a carriage wall woke with the weave of his coat stamped across his cheek. A child stumbled in the market and rose wailing, knees already swelling pink. A woman kneading dough wore flour to the wrist, the flesh there reddened where the bowl had struck bone.
All of them were marked so easily. Bodies carried evidence of living long after the world had touched them. Even idleness left proof.
It was a quiet fascination he did not indulge often. Haiki said staring invited attention, and attention was a luxury they could not afford. So he trained himself to look briefly, then away, and kept his curiosities tucked neatly behind his teeth.
He turned those eyes inward instead. To his own skin. To his own softness, if it could be called that.
He looked solid enough at first glance. Pale flesh, narrow wrists, the ordinary architecture of a thin young man assembled with no obvious mistakes. But his body’s solidity was a performance more than a fact, a convincing illusion maintained so long as no one pressed too hard.
His skin was paper-thin and secretive. It purpled and reddened with pain, but bruises rarely settled where they ought to, wandering beneath the surface before fading elsewhere. Pressure lingered too long inside him, sinking inward rather than dispersing, as if the flesh could not decide what to do with force once it had entered.
Cuts sealed with glistening seams that shimmered silver for days. Cold made crystal fans bloom over his shoulders in delicate branching frost. Heat turned the crooks of his elbows pearlescent and damp, as if something marine had opened there to breathe unseen.
Sometimes candlelight passed through his fingers strangely. It caught in the bones, or what pretended to be bones, and lit him from within in soft veins of rose and gold. Pearl once called it beautiful in the same tone one might use for stained glass or lightning.
He had hated her for that kindness. Then hated himself for hating it.
His body was killing him. Oddly poetic, if he were honest. A lovely, lovely, lovely mess of blood and thin skin and soft soft soft things arranged around something that did not wish to be human.
Fear sent his joints locking rigid until movement came in sharp puppet-starts. Shame made his hair lighten strand by strand, paling toward white in visible surrender. Hunger hollowed him so completely he could feel his organs shifting for space, sliding like fish in shallow water whenever he bent.
Grief had been the worst of it. Grief once left a row of black petals growing from the base of his throat, glossy as lacquer and trembling with each swallow. Haiki had plucked them one by one in silence, dropping them into a bowl as though harvesting fruit.
Aurien still remembered the wet roots. The tiny sting each time one came free. The way Haiki refused to meet his eyes.
He was not soft, not in the way people were. He yielded without yielding, bent without changing, bruised without proof. Whatever tenderness existed in him had to live around the body, never within it.
His sister was a saint for dealing with him.
…
His thoughts came and went with the wind, small and humourless things. They slipped through the broken glass of the window and stirred the rafters barely holding the fire-singed roof together.
Nothing in New Hope stayed still for long, not even grief.
Outside, evening gathered in shades of blue and peach and ash. At this hour the village always looked softer than it deserved, dusk kind enough to blur ruin into something almost gentle. New Hope wore twilight well.
Collapsed roofs ribbed the sky. Charred frames leaned into one another like drunks refusing to fall alone. Gardens Pearl once tended had gone wild in strange directions, roots splitting stone, ivy swallowing names carved into old wood, pale flowers blooming from cracks where no seed should have taken.
Even silence felt damaged here. It broke now and then beneath the groan of old timber or the thin whistle of wind threading through broken walls. The whole place sounded as though it breathed through injured lungs. He missed when silence was broken by laughter and life.
Aurien sat on the edge of a narrow cot fashioned from scavenged boards and blankets gone thin with years. A basin of rainwater rested beside him, its surface dark and still until his breathing troubled it. He looked down and found his reflection wavering there, stretched by every tremor of breath and body.
In the water he looked as he always did, which was to say not at all like himself. Some lovelier and freer version stared back with faraway eyes, paler skin, and hair long enough to rope around the world twice over. The face in reflections had a habit of seeming untouched by the life that wore it.
Only his temples felt honest. There, strands of platinum had begun their quiet spread, whitening from stress or shame or whatever private cruelty his body chose this week. He bent at the waist and they slipped into his vision, annoying, unavoidable.
He touched the side of his neck where the petals had once rooted. The skin remained smooth beneath his fingertips, though colder than the rest of him, as if some season lingered there alone.
Sometimes, when he swallowed, he could still swear he felt stems shifting under the flesh.
“Aurien!”
Outside, footsteps crossed the yard. Measured. Familiar. Haiki never wasted movement. Even her tread had purpose to it, light over loose stone, careful over rot-soft boards, each step placed as if the earth itself might bruise if handled poorly.
She paused just beyond the hanging cloth that served as a door.
Her eyes found him before he made any move to look back. They always did. Sharp and dark and too observant by half. Tonight they were ringed in fatigue, the corners drawn tight with something heavier than annoyance.
Mournful.
He wished she would stop looking at him like that.
“Hi,” he said instead, too bright, too easy. He shifted to sit cross-legged on the cot, arranging himself quickly as if he had not been folded over moments ago, wallowing in the private embarrassment of being himself.
Haiki smiles, and it's all teeth, but there's no joy in her expression. “You’ve not eaten.”
It was not a question. Haiki had never needed questions where he was concerned. She knew by the untouched bowl near the hearth, by the sharpening angles of his wrists, by the way his voice sat thinner in his throat.
Protective.
Bothersome.
A good sibling, truly, if Aurien had taken more time to be grateful rather than irritated.
He shrugged and reached for the lace of his boot, worrying it between restless fingers. In the low light it looked pale and stringy, and for one distracted second he imagined it as sinew peeled clean from bone.
“I’m not hungry,” he said with a sigh. “You were complaining about food money just last week, Kiki. Shouldn’t it be a good thing I’m rationing?”
Haiki’s glare could have turned most people to stone.
Aurien, unfortunately, could not be stone if he’d tried. He had imagined it before, what a mercy it would be to become something fixed. Marble. Salt. Wood. A posed statue to be still forever.
“But you aren’t rationing,” she said. “You’re just not eating.”
“It amounts to the same thing.”
“No. One is practical. The other is stupid.”
He gave a soft, scandalized breath. “You wound me.”
“I should hope so. Nothing else seems to leave a mark.”
The words landed between them before either could catch them.
Silence followed, thin and bright-edged. Aurien sniffled.
Haiki’s mouth tightened at once. Regret crossed her face in a quick shadow, there and gone. Aurien looked down at his hands. Long fingers. Pale knuckles. Silk instead of skin, untouched by all the things that should have sank in.
That had always seemed unfair.
People were softened by living. They wore evidence of themselves everywhere. Calluses, scars, laugh-lines, the pink impression of a pillow on waking skin. Even pain made them more legible. Aurien passed through days as though wrapped in glass. The world touched him and left uncertain whether it had touched anything at all.
“Well,” he said lightly, because someone had to. “That was almost funny. You’re getting better, Haiki.”
“Aurien.”
“Don’t.” He pulled the lace tighter, fingers beginning to tremble. Lips flattened to a line. “I know what you meant.”
Another pause. Outside, wind moved through the ruined gardens. Somewhere in the village an old beam groaned like something sleeping badly.
Haiki stepped inside fully then, ducking beneath the cloth. She carried a bundle wrapped in faded linen, and the smell reached him before she spoke again.
Bread. Broth. Something stewed soft enough to swallow.
His stomach answered with immediate violence. Bile rising up his throat. Settling against the roof of his mouth.
A contraction rolled through him so sharply he doubled forward before he could hide it. Pain cinched low in his abdomen, then traveled upward in a smooth, sickening glide. Beneath the skin of his side, something shifted visibly, a long ripple passing from hip to rib as though a creature swam there seeking warmer water.
Haiki crossed the room in two strides.
“There it is,” she said quietly, all irritation gone. “Heres my rationing.”
“I hate you.” He could never hate her.
“No you don’t.” True.
“I could.” He's never been a good liar.
“You’d need the energy first.” Again, true.
Despite himself, a cracked laugh escaped him. It hurt all the way up. Light flickered beneath the skin at his wrists, thin pink seams threading through blue veins. Hunger always made him luminous in the ugliest ways, as if the body meant to display its suffering proudly.
Haiki knelt before him and unwrapped the bundle onto the cot between them.
“Eat,” she said.
“I’ll be sick.”
“You’ll be sick anyway.” She hands him the bowl, forces it into shaking hands.
Woke up to an accusation in my AO3 comments, so let me clear everything up ^^
I do not use AI or outside assistance for any of my work, written or illustrative, and I never will.
DIECYM is a passion project I’ve sunk 50+ hours into at this point. I make it because I care about it. I make it because I enjoy it. I make it for me first and foremost.
Is it perfect? NO! Are somethings rushed and end up looking sloppy, of course!
That does not mean AI was involved, and it definitely does not mean strangers get to stroll into my comments throwing accusations around with nothing to back them up.
Like genuinely, be serious for a second. Why on earth would I use AI for a niche fic I’m writing for myself? Who would that benefit? What would even be the point?
If you don’t like my work, that is completely free. Click away. Block me. Move on.
But coming into my space to disrespect the time, effort, and care I’ve put into something personal is not welcome. Especially not on AO3 >:((
