Before Monday

It’s Jan. The window opens Monday morning.

I’ll text you a link when it does. Before then, I want Monday to feel simple, so this note covers what a portrait costs and exactly how the window works.

But first, a small favor.

Go find your blueprint.

It’s in your email from the day you finished the Quest. Open it, and read it like a stranger wrote it about your character.

I ask because most people forget what they made. That document holds how your character carries themselves, the details only you’d know, all of it already in words. People who commission art usually spend weeks trying to get their character out of their head and onto paper. You did it in five minutes, without it feeling like work.

The hard part is already done. The only thing left to decide on Monday is whether I get to paint them.

Now the honest part. If you’ve never commissioned art before, paying a stranger upfront probably comes with a small knot in your stomach. It did for me.

The artists were never the problem. Most are talented, and most are honest. The hard part is hiring one when you have no real way of knowing how it’ll go.

The first time, I found someone on Instagram whose work I loved, sent a careful little message, and then waited. Sometimes for days. Their commissions were closed, or it just sat there on read, and every time I’d wonder if I was even allowed to be asking.

So I tried Reddit. The replies flooded in, close to a hundred, and for a second I figured this would be the easy part. Then I started actually looking, and I couldn’t always tell what was real. The same images kept turning up under different names. Styles that didn’t quite match from one piece to the next. I wasn’t out to catch anyone. I just had no way of knowing who was who, so I spent days vetting strangers, which is a strange thing to be doing when all you wanted was a picture of your character.

I did find someone good in the end. But the waiting wore me down. The piece ran long, updates were slow, and in the quiet stretches my mind kept drifting to the worst version of it. That I’d handed $200 to a stranger. That it might look nothing like what was in my head.

None of that came true. But it shouldn’t have felt like that much of a gamble.

So when I opened my own commissions, I built everything backwards from that feeling.

• A real guarantee. If the first painting doesn’t feel like your character, you get every dollar back.
• Unlimited revisions that never cost extra. We keep going until it’s right.
• A guided process. You don’t have to be an art director. You tell me what you know, and I ask about the rest. Your blueprint already covers most of it.

And I work on every painting myself.

The risk sits with me, where it belongs. Your job is just to want the painting.

Here’s what it costs, so nothing on Monday surprises you.

A half body portrait is $99. Thigh up is $139, and it’s the one most people choose. Full body is $199.

There’s a Pay in 4 option at checkout that splits any of them into four payments. The full body works out to about $50 at a time.

There’s no countdown on any of this. The window opens, and when the slots fill, it closes.

So here’s exactly how Monday goes.

Monday morning, I text the list a link to a private listing. Only people on this list can buy from it.

Slots open in waves, and the texts go out in waves too, roughly in the order people signed on. So it’s possible you get the text, click through, and the spots are already gone.

If that happens, you weren’t too late as a person. I just ran out of hands. You move up the line, and you’re first in for the next month.

You’ll hear from me twice on Monday at most. Once when it opens, and once more if it fills. That’s it.

If the timing’s not right this month, that’s okay. The list doesn’t expire, and neither does your blueprint.

But if you’ve been waiting for the right moment to finally see your character for real, this is the simplest one I can give you.

Find the spot on the wall. I’ll handle the rest.

Jan