First of all and most important thing to point out, I want to clarify that I don’t want to compare my situation with others, I am well aware that the other statements are much more painful, and on a personal level, which I think it’s always worse than professional.
I’m mainly writing this to vent all the emotions of something that I was scared to talk about before, as a professional artist.
Second, I don’t want any kind of public reaction to this, I really do not want to appear on videos or similar. I do not want my case being used as an excuse to put more hate into it, I just want to share and let it out my chest. I’ll probably delete it in the end.
Third, it may look like I want to ride the wave of drama, but for me this confession has more cons than pros, that’s why I was thinking if I should do it or not. At least I know that people that really know me know that my intentions with this are purely emotional venting. So please, do not follow me, share my art or whatever for pity or drama, it would be the worst feeling.
CONTEXT:
As you may know I’m Nixeu, a digital artist, and like many artists on Twitter, we are fighting to survive, keep our art on your tl, but it's been very difficult lately.
In my case it was worse because my main account is shadowbanned for 2 years now, due a hacking problem, so I had to start again.
A few months ago I had the idea of “if I can’t reach people with my profile, maybe I can do it through art collabs with vtubers”
Some people told me that it was not worth it but I wanted to try.
So I made this post:
I was offering a business collab, a free illustration for them to use as they want, merch included (something bigger should be discussed ofc) but from the beginning I was saying that I needed the Patreon shoutout to compensate for the commission costs.
I contacted some vtubers I was interested in working with, because I liked their design and I thought it would be worth the deal.
For me, a full drawing takes me a lot of time, effort… and I also have to take care of everything by myself, Patreon included, so I was looking for 1/1 deals, something that both sides can gain something from.
One of them was Sinder, so I contacted her by email.
I was asking her if she would be interested in that kind of collaboration, about Patreon and showing a few examples with my art. I did the same with others.
Many people were interested in the end and I was incredibly happy.
I received a twitter dm from her, interested in my proposal. I can’t describe how happy I was at that moment, only close people know.
To be honest everything was going well, RED was answering from time to time but I understood that they were very busy at that moment.
As you can see here I’m repeating the conditions and how the collab is about free art for a Patreon shoutout (this is important because it will be the main problem here)
After that, they asked me in a more professional way about the details.
It was ok, but they told me in the beginning that any outfit would be ok… but to be honest I just thought that was completely normal, and that they were just taking it more professionally
So for me it was fine, and I just repeated the conditions with even more details, because they were asking for extras as layers, to do an animation I think and the NSFW version for her Fansly. So I tried to explain to them that as this was a 1/1 collab, the art was free for her, the only thing that was worth it for me was the shoutout, for the NSFW version. Because otherwise it would just be me working for free.
They agreed with all the conditions as you can see here:
I remember that I was in the stream again and I literally jumped when I saw they agreed, super happy. My viewers were laughing a lot because I was for minutes doing sounds of happiness because I couldn't contain my excitement.
From that moment I started to think about more poses, doing tests, color palettes, which style would be better…
So I started working hard on the “commission”, showing them different options as you can see here. Their answers were very positive in general so I was happy BUT after the third time I talked about the conditions, the ones they knew from the beginning, something changed, when the drawing was half way already (and I was streaming the process)
I honestly don’t know if I did something wrong or they felt bad about the second proposal, I just thought that, as my patrons and people liked the B option, it would be good for both of us to do both, maybe it sounded greedy but that was not my intention AT ALL.
Even so, they could tell me that it was too much and I’d completely understand and step back, but they just told me this instead:
At that moment I was so sad that I was not even able to cry, I was just devastated. Maybe you think that I’m too weak or overreacting, I’d understand because others could react differently. But I come from many bad situations feeling that my art is not worth anything anymore, my acc is shadowbanned, I got ghosted many times and this situation was making me think that I may have some value after all. So that answer, after me emphasizing the conditions over and over and them agreeing with everything… I was done.
So from here on I asked someone to help me with the formulations from here on to the end of this whole thing, to make it clear why this was not acceptable for me while still being diplomatic about it. It resulted in this:
Again, here i was just trying to stay professional without causing any problems, because by that time I was streaming the drawing process with people in my chat being super into the drawing and her as a Vtuber, happy for me, while I was feeling miserable inside, pretending that everything was fine and I was happy.
They answered with “it was a confusion, let’s keep it”, but I was still feeling that something was not ok.
Even so I finished the drawing, they seemed interested too so I had some hope that it was just a misunderstanding.
I talked to them about the NSFW Version because again, that was the special thing to show to compensate for the free art (reminder: this was never a simple fanart but a 1/1 collab)
They told me that was too much for the stream so I fixed it for the stream, after that no answers until I sent to them the art pack with all the versions for them to use, except for the complete NSFW version because that was the deal.
After they told me that they did the promotion, something was smelling weird to me so I checked the clip, where she was visually uncomfortable, showing my art, not the nsfw, barely mentioning my Patreon at all, just in a fast “look at the text in the bottom here, maybe there is something there” and telling her community that they can find me in an art RT she did.
So I felt scammed, she showed my art? Yes, but there's a big difference between our deal and what she did. I left the choice about how long they want to talk about this on stream to everyone who did this collab with me, but not even mentioning Patreon directly was not part of that choice. Maybe for people that do not think much she was as always, but for me she was clearly doing something she didn’t want to.
In the end I’m still glad that thanks to that, some people found me and they are happy about that too, but my experience was bad, if we think about this as a professional deal, I worked for weeks essentially for free.
I wanted to talk about this from an artist's perspective, if you are uncomfortable with a deal, just do not take it in the first place, if in the end you are going to try to throw the artist away.
I can understand misunderstandings, more with me because I’m still learning proper English, but I think I was pretty clear and I stated the conditions like 4 times.
I felt guilty because I was thinking that I did something wrong, I was scared to talk about this because I think maybe it’s not a big deal for many people and it’s super personal, and I felt unworthy, because when you see 0 interest even when you try your best, you start feeling that maybe you're not good enough.
So this is not to make you feel worse towards one person, it’s more like a scream to tell you that an artist is a person too, please treat your artists well, honor your professional deals and respect people around you.
Thanks for reading.
