Back in October 2020, Japan’s largest online artwork community, Pixiv, rolled out a request system to its users. As its name implies, this functionality allows any artist on the service to begin accepting paid requests from the community, and should they like a concept, accept it, and produce it within a 60-day deadline. To date, more than 13,000 requests have been sent by clients to artists on Pixiv, with a steady stream of artists joining the service.
With this still being a new service implemented into a pre-existing website, features have slowly been added month by month. We to this day await for support for some of the more interesting aspects of Pixiv such as VRoid and sensei to be incorporated into the request system, but a few new features have been rolled out in recent months. In their fifth monthly update, Pixiv have confirmed the following features and improvements are available to clients and artists:
The page to send a request now displays the in-progress and completed requests by the creator you’re about to contact.
- Creators can now receive e-mails about their profits.
- Links can now be added to the content of a request and to request terms.
- The request details page is now automatically displayed as translated.
- Messages in a creator’s request terms can now be automatically translated.
- Creators now receive a congratulatory message when posting a requested work.
There isn’t much in terms of features for the clients this time around, although the improvements to the translation system are welcome. Check back at the end of March to read more about the improvements made to this artwork commissioning system.
