I started doing commissions before I thought I was ready because people started asking me for commissions. I'm from a small town. I was in my early twenties, self-taught, no idea what I was doing, but people needed art on small budgets so they'd get me in to make stuff and pay me for it.
I think people starting out tend sometimes have some wrong ideas about what level you need to be to get commissions, and where you should look for them.
When you hang out on artist communities online, you get a really warped sense of how good most people are at drawing. Most people are very bad at drawing; they have nowhere near professional skill or equipment. Most people out there in the world have a way lower bar for quality than you do and even your work that's kinda crappy looks amazing to them.
You are good enough to get commissions when you're better at drawing than an average rando you'll find on the street or in an office. Most people don't even want super-fancy art anyway. A lot of my big commissions are cute, simple cartoons to make tech conferences less intimidating. They're so easy to draw and below my skill ceiling it almost feels like cheating, but they commission me because they know me (because I've worked with tech people before and have a bit of techy background) I do a nice polished job for reasonable money and I'm easy to work with.
And here's a tip: The best place to look is where other artists aren't. You can't compete with top-tier artists yet? That's fine, don't compete with them! Most of my early commissions came through Facebook, and it was manga portraits of people. People wanted them for online avatars, they wanted them as presents for teenage kids, I even got commissioned to draw somebody's dog more than once! Charge around £30, it's an affordable and unique gift that is a fun novelty. Other early work I did was advertising small businesses and running workshops local schools and libraries.
I didn't launch myself out of the gate doing commissions for international tech conferences, BBC books and promo work on Nintendo games! Hell no! There's no way I had the skill, contacts or experience to get jobs like that back then! Start small and either in a niche community (look to your hobbies, I did work for rock climbing centres and magazines because I was an artist they knew because I climb who cares about drawing the equipment correctly. I once got paid in a year's free climbing vouchers!) or to your literal local community.
If you ever see somebody making bank doing terrible commissions and think "HOW!?" "How does this person keep getting work when they suck!?" it's probably because they advertised themselves to a community that doesn't know where to look for, or never even thought to look for artists.
To get a commission, you don't need to be the best artist in the world; you only need to be the best for a job requiring illustration that somebody knows about and can afford.
