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I think these were my first ever freelance art sucks. I was just reminded of them, so I thought I'd share!
When I was a teenager the town I lived in had regular little fairs and carnivals. This wasn't like the county fair with rides and livestock though, this was a town of five or six hundred people at the time, so they were tiny little things where my grandpa cooked free pancakes for everybody and a handful of random townsfolk had little booths selling home cooking or handicrafts to each other.
I did face painting there for a couple of years. I charged a quarter per drawing, and painted nearly every kid in town, and usually made all of ten bucks, if that.
But half way through one of these events a mother comes storming over to me, dragging her son, who'd gotten something like a dragon painted on his arm. She was absolutely flipping out! I can't remember exactly what she said, but she ranted at me for a good five minutes about how tattoos were Of The Devil, and by painting her son I was putting a fake tattoo on him and making him look like a sinner, and that was just as evil as getting a real one, and I should be ashamed of myself. The poor kid was crying his head off. I just stared blankly at this woman until she ran out of rant and stormed off to wash off her son's arm. It was a very conservative, religious little town, but she was the only person I've ever met, still to this day, who thinks that face-painting children is a sin! I always felt very sorry for her kids after that.
A couple of years later I decided to try and branch out a bit, so my little booth also had sketch caricatures. Just like you see at any fair, but done by a 17 year old high school student, so not really that good.
I think my grandfather was just about my only customer for them.
While I was sitting there and drawing, a man came over and told me that he wanted to get a picture of the local temple. (This was in Utah, so there were quite a lot of various Mormon temples around, and pictures of them are admittedly popular.) Nothing sucky about that request, of course, but he was my first taste of something that was to become one of my biggest pet peeves, because when I explained that I only draw animals and people, not buildings or anything else, he spent what seemed like eternity arguing with me that anybody who could draw at all would be able to draw temples just fine, and that I'd make tons and tons of money drawing temples, and I needed to stop doing the other art and just do temples and I'd make so much more money, and he just would not LISTEN to anything I said! I was much too shy to tell him off back then, but if he tried it now he'd get a piece of my mind! Architecture and portraiture are *totally* different skill sets!
Those were my first two sucky customers ever. And while I did "real" jobs for many years after that, when I went back to doing art, I swiftly learned that those two had been a foretaste of what was to come, because the two types of suck I run into the most these days are those who are just plain nuts, and those who think I'm doing something "wrong" with my business model. Just about every story I've posted here is one or the other of 'em! (Well, and people who are just plain rude and/or cheap.)
When I was a teenager the town I lived in had regular little fairs and carnivals. This wasn't like the county fair with rides and livestock though, this was a town of five or six hundred people at the time, so they were tiny little things where my grandpa cooked free pancakes for everybody and a handful of random townsfolk had little booths selling home cooking or handicrafts to each other.
I did face painting there for a couple of years. I charged a quarter per drawing, and painted nearly every kid in town, and usually made all of ten bucks, if that.
But half way through one of these events a mother comes storming over to me, dragging her son, who'd gotten something like a dragon painted on his arm. She was absolutely flipping out! I can't remember exactly what she said, but she ranted at me for a good five minutes about how tattoos were Of The Devil, and by painting her son I was putting a fake tattoo on him and making him look like a sinner, and that was just as evil as getting a real one, and I should be ashamed of myself. The poor kid was crying his head off. I just stared blankly at this woman until she ran out of rant and stormed off to wash off her son's arm. It was a very conservative, religious little town, but she was the only person I've ever met, still to this day, who thinks that face-painting children is a sin! I always felt very sorry for her kids after that. A couple of years later I decided to try and branch out a bit, so my little booth also had sketch caricatures. Just like you see at any fair, but done by a 17 year old high school student, so not really that good.
I think my grandfather was just about my only customer for them.While I was sitting there and drawing, a man came over and told me that he wanted to get a picture of the local temple. (This was in Utah, so there were quite a lot of various Mormon temples around, and pictures of them are admittedly popular.) Nothing sucky about that request, of course, but he was my first taste of something that was to become one of my biggest pet peeves, because when I explained that I only draw animals and people, not buildings or anything else, he spent what seemed like eternity arguing with me that anybody who could draw at all would be able to draw temples just fine, and that I'd make tons and tons of money drawing temples, and I needed to stop doing the other art and just do temples and I'd make so much more money, and he just would not LISTEN to anything I said! I was much too shy to tell him off back then, but if he tried it now he'd get a piece of my mind!
Architecture and portraiture are *totally* different skill sets! Those were my first two sucky customers ever. And while I did "real" jobs for many years after that, when I went back to doing art, I swiftly learned that those two had been a foretaste of what was to come, because the two types of suck I run into the most these days are those who are just plain nuts, and those who think I'm doing something "wrong" with my business model. Just about every story I've posted here is one or the other of 'em! (Well, and people who are just plain rude and/or cheap.)
geez. 
...But that's about it. If I try to draw a person, I'd just have to tell people that I was "attempting to emulate Picasso", rather than "I suck at drawing people" x.x
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