LW - My Apartment Art Commission Process by jenn

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My Apartment Art Commission Process, published by jenn on August 27, 2024 on LessWrong.
When I know that I'm going to be moving out from an apartment soon, I commission a digital artist to draw it for me. Then I print it out and I have a cool art piece. If you love your current place but you don't think you'll spend the rest of your life there, you should consider doing the same.
Digital artists are much cheaper than I think they should be. I've paid artists between $200-$500 CAD[1] for my commissions, generally spread across one or two additional housemates. (You should expect to pay more - I limit my own commissions to the common areas since my bedrooms tend to be very plain, and solely used for sleep and other private activities. Also inflation exists.)
You can also consider hiring artists from developing countries if you want your dollar to go further, but I don't have any advice on how to seek those folks out specifically.
You'll be looking at around 10 hours of effort on your end, frontloaded but spread out across 2-4 months. I detail my process below.
But first, here are the pieces that I've commissioned so far:
Aren't they sick as hell??? I love them so much. Okay, let's get you started on yours.
I'll stick a sample email script at the bottom too.
Commissioning An Art Of Your Living Space, Step By Step
1. come up with a budget
talk to your roomies if you have them, and come up with a price you're willing to pay altogether. i think my apartment commissions are probably 15-30? hours of work, multiply that by how much you're willing to pay a skilled artisan for an hour of work. (i should note that in 3/3 cases for me, the minimum budget ended up being like 30-100% more than what the artist was willing to accept. digital artists often decline to charge reasonable rates for their labour.)
2. find 2-3 viable artists
endorsed strategies involve browsing r/wimmelbilder, the twitter/tumblr hashtag #isometricart, and google imagesing "isometric apartment layout" and clicking around. for maximal exposure to artists that are open to work, search dribbble.com for "isometric", but note that the pickings there are fairly slim.
in many isometric tags i find a lot of rendered stuff but i prefer to go for more trad art forms as i expect renderings to be more time consuming (expensive), harder to edit, and worse for the amount of detail i want[2]. also, you don't need to commission specifically an isometric piece! you can go wild at this step finding any artist who illustrates interiors in a way you like.
while browsing, it could be a good idea to save sample images that you like; you can then pass them on to the artist of your choice as reference for what kind of art appeals to you.
find artists whose work make you feel actively excited, when you think about having your own apartment done in their style.
check out the portfolios of artists you like. you're looking for portfolios with a pretty solid number of pieces, ideally at least like ~5 years of stuff, and maybe a consistent style if it's a style you like.
new artists could be high variance, and for all you know you might be messaging a talented 15 year old who will drop you like a hot potato when they need to start studying for an exam in earnest (my little brother has turned down commission inquiries for this reason when he was in high school).
i don't think AI art is good enough to do this kind of work yet, so I'd stick with traditional digital (lol) artists for now.
3. email the viable artists
email the artists whose portfolios passed the vibe check, letting them know what you want to commission them for and your budget, and asking for a quote if they are open to working with you. having 2-3 artists on hand here is good because it's kind of 50/50 if any particular artist online is accepting commissions. don't take it p...