I am a writer and i want ask artists about how they feel on about collaboration

[florateller]

I am asking a personal opinion i hope you won't mind
The thing is
A few months ago i asked a few artists on insta whether they are willing to do a collab with me
I made sure that they know i am looking for unpaid artists and if we make profit we will split it into equal percentage
And one of the artists I DM-ed agreed and i shared the whole plot, character sketch and timeline everything with them
after drawing the first chapter we decided to add another artist so that we can increase the uploading speed since we are both minor students
After some weeks we finally found another artist who is willing to do a collab unpaid (also a minor)
But the problem is that my first artist blocked me for some reason and my second artist is not responding to my messages now

I really want to know the reason
I want to what i did wrong
I am kinda having a mental breakdown now
I want to fix my mistakes
So please give me some suggestions on what i should do

[darthmongoose]

Oof, that's rough.

Working with unpaid artists, especially minors or other inexperienced people, is always a bit of a minefield. People often commit to things when they'e not really good at gauging how much work it'll be or how long it'll take, and then they get stressed out, realising there's no way they can keep up with the responsibility they've taken on, but they're too scared to say "sorry, I misjudged this, I'm going to have to back out" they just ghost instead.

You might not really have done anything wrong, you were just working with artists who weren't ready for the level of responsibility.

Try to look for artists with a fairly large portfolio of work over a number of years, ideally adults, and talk through what you want to make. It might be best to start small like "let's try making a pilot episode first to see how well we work together". If the artist finishes the episode, but doesn't want to work further, you'd at least get a portfolio piece out of that, and so would the artist.

[candiedcotton]

This is really common, and there are a lot of things that will lead to your artist ghosting you. First off, people shouldn't just ghost you, and should have been upfront about why they ditched. But that aside, possible reasons:

1. They weren't into the story much. It's hard to keep motivated when working on someone else's story, for free. For me, it needs to be a very good story that I'm invested in and believe in, and I need to feel like I am a part of it, and not slaving away as an employee who doesn't get to have real input on the story.

2. You might have been overly picky or hovering too much, or had too much expectation. A collaboration is not the same as a hired commission. I've had/seen so many writers who don't understand things like scene focus, color theory, lighting, etc., trying to push too hard on their uneducated views when it actually hurts the scene and the experienced artists' ideas improve it. Let the artist do the art. I've literally had a writer complain you couldn't see the shoelaces on an NPC in a bustling city scene. We parted ways that day.

3. How often are you interacting? How much of their time do you expect, and is it reasonable, considering they are making zero income for their time? Real money (or school, or whatever life expectations they have) comes first.

[system]

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