>>252295
Continued.
I wanted to add some of my own experience to try and get this ball rolling.
I primarily used DeviantArt to search out possible artists. This was mainly because I use DeviantArt the most. Overall, I would say DeviantArt is pretty decent. But, a lot of the artists that I looked at happened to be present mainly on X/Twitter and most importantly, their status of Commission availability I found was more often included on twitter profiles and twitter profiles often had an easier time locating expected price and quality documents from the artist.
As for reaching out. Be normal and respectful, even if this is a fetish art space. The artists are still people. For what you could say to start (Especially if you don't know if the artist's commissions are open) could be: "Hi, I am a fan of your art and am interested commissioning you."
As for finding references, I had a sizable list of saved art I like on DeviantArt and found that copying links of art I want to be used as references into a document to be a decently effective way of finding and getting references into one neat place. I imagine doing a similar linking process on twitter would work about the same. I didn't for commission request at all, but you may want to download the images and put them into a document or even link and download for each reference. Whatever way you go, even if you go one these routes, it is up to you and even the artist to some degree, if they have certain methods of doing things.
As for how to best organize, I don't think I have that quite nailed down yet. But as for going the document method with my basic outline, it's format basically was (From top to bottom order):
1. Title
2. Questions specific to your document you want the artist to answer. For me, these were questions and answers that could have had drastic or minor effects on the rest of the document depending on the answer.
3. Delivery Specifications (I wanted to have especially high pixel density images, so I mentioned that in this section. You can mention other things of course, like that you want a clean version as well without any text bubbles.)
4. Things you don't want in your commission (Things like: I don't want sweat. No slob elements. No armpit hair. Etc.)
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