On the subject of ‘credit’
Lately (lately being actually around two or three months ago, thankfully) I've been recieving some Private Messages on some other social media asking me to work on very personal proyects, that would consume a lot of tme and effort, 'in exchange of appearing in the credits / the popularity that follows'.
Please do not do this. Neither to me nor any other artist.
We need to eat and pay bills too, and I can assure you if we ARE interested in a proyect, it will be one that we have discovered ourselves, call to us, and will more than probably be very vocal about.
I understand it’s a difficult concept to grasp when you don’t have the money to pay for a commission or monthly income, but you’re basically asking someone to do a part-time / full-time work for you for free, in something that no-one ever knows if it’ll really work out on the market.
This kind of risks, are something that one usually only goes through for very close friends or products you strongly believe to have high potential, sometimes both simultaneously.
And when this happens on enterprises- it’s usually because it’s you and 4 friends that have created it in the first place so you can actually sell your product legaly, so we’re in the same situation as before.
I’ve unfortunatelly gone through this once before. It was a comic-proyect a friend had, that wasn’t much at the time, but could have the potential to become a nice fantasy world, so when he told me to collaborate, I was naïve to say ‘why not?’.
What followed was a slow but steady behaivour change on my friend’s part. I was stupid enough to focus so much on that on the first months of world-building and character design, everytime I had some spare time from highschool, that it ended backfiring me.
Difficult tests and subjects came, they drained all my time and energy, I went through several art-blocks too. Anytime I wanted to draw, I simply wanted to relax and doodle a bit, after all, there was no rush to do a comic which was still quite empty plot-wise, not much to actually draw panels about - but my friend was basically forcing me to draw proyect-related stuff (either for the actual comic or just random stuff with the characters) 24/7/365.
Needless to say: I ended up hating the proyect, and had to cut ties with them after I said I didn’t want anything to do with the proyect anymore, because it was basically fucking myself emotionally. I do not lie when I say I felt like shit at first, but that quickly turned into a very pleasant calm and freedom sense.
I was stupid to accept to help in a proyect that was too large for my skills & reachability at the time, and that I had little-to-no control nor saying on plot or character narrative development, as my ideas would usually be turned down for no other reason than personal likings. So instead of a two-team proyect, it felt more like a “I bring the idea and control everything and you just draw whatever I tell you exactly how I imagined” thing.
What I’m trying to say with this was- whenever I hear that someone was reached to work on a proyect ‘in exchange for credit’, I can’t help but remember this situation I lived, and connect the two. Because I’m sure most of the time, this “artist-slave”-ish situation is what will come from accepting them.
I won’t lie- There were good things to come from that, and I legitimately had fun with it (and with that friend. The good times are still good times even if it ended up like that) at first, but the stress, constant arguing, extreme control and lack of freedom wasn’t worth it.
(Tbh, even if the behaivour change was my friend’s, I blame myself for not stopping this sooner either, when I first detected it or saw I had not the time for it. I am also to blame.)
So, young artists, do yourselves a favour and think carefully before accepting any kind of big collaboration (this can be applied to commission amount / complexity too!), specially if it’s just for your name to be on the credits of a game or webcomic. It’s important to know how to say no.
