First up, let me stress this: most of the clients I've had while working freelance have been fantastic. I've worked for roughly twenty clients in the past six months and only three of them were bad eggs. The rest were fantastic and, judging by their feedback, enjoyed working with me as much as I enjoyed working with them.

The client I created the above picture for, however, is is one of the bag eggs. I don't intend to mention any names, but you wouldn't recognise the company name even if I mentioned it, so no worries there.

The client was working on a Halo ripoff (using a Halo platform, even) and hired me to design body armour for the main character. My first design was too cartoony and he requested that I adhere closely to the Halo style of body armour, even demanding green and black as the colour combo for the armour. I was concerned that this would produce something too close to Halo, but he wanted what he wanted so I went ahead with it.

When I produced this, he decided it was TOO Halo for his tastes (shock!), and despite my offer to give it another shot, he had the half-payment he'd made up-front through Paypal reversed. I fought the reversal and won: the payment was reversed back in my favour.

Lesson: If you're going to commission an artist, please have enough respect to decide what end result you'd like to see, because we're not mind-readers and we can't pre-guess your next change of heart.

Lesson 2: Also, don't try to screw people over when you've paid via Paypal.

Lesson 3: If you want copyright of the image I create for you, you'll pay me in full.