A Tale of an Abandonded Commission

[Wired]

Hello everyone,

I apologize for being so inactive these past days and not having given the appropriate applause and reps for the great pieces that have been posted and worked on in the meantime.

Today's tale is a strange one. Almost eighteen months ago I was commissioned to work on a colored world map. It was supposed to be an extension of a number of commissions the same client had ordered from our own Sapiento, namely "Multania" and a few location and city maps. I cannot directly link to DeviantArt from where I'm typing this post, but if you follow him there you should be able to easily find the pieces in question.

The world map I was commissioned to do was my largest commissioned piece up to then, and was among my first colored commissions, too. The start was fine, and the input and feedback from the client was helpful and proactive. I'd like to use this moment to stress that this post here is a no way meant to complain about the absentee client. He was pleasant to work with, and up until he left I was handsomely paid for my efforts. Anyway, the point is that he did become an absentee client after a while, probably about four weeks into the project. The world map didn't have as much priority as Multania had, since that was where his game primarily took place. There were job-related reasons involved as well. My last communication with him dates back to June 2016, and I haven't had a sign of life from him since. Yes, that's over a year now.

Anyway, a few weeks back I decided that the huge file didn't do any good simply by wasting away on my harddrive, and in between commissions I picked up the work again, trying to make what I had more presentable without completely redesigning what I had up until then. As such the map lacks a few elements that most of my more recent maps have (land contour lines, for example). It's more of a clean-up and completion rather than a complete reconstruction. I wanted to finish this, not re-do it, after all.

Looking back at it, the learning process I went through is apparent everywhere to me, from the colors and shading up to the way I structured my layers. That is to say, holy crap, trying to get some structure into it when I picked it up again was a major pain in my backside (so many useless layers, so many layers I could/should have combined... urgh!).

Alas, usually unfinished commissions aren't a source for much merryment. Fortunately, this one did turn out differently. The result of posting this in various Google+ and Facebook groups is that I have been able to acquire a number of commissions that, combined, financially outweight the initial one by several factors. The lesson that I take away from this experience is that, ultimately, no abandoned commission is truly ever done in vain. A piece in your portfolio, whether you ended up being paid for it or not, is a piece that will aid you in attracting clients down the road. Even a revived piece that still leaves much room for improvement.

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