I've only ever had to contact an artist once to ask about my commission. It was a sketch page and I waited a month or two before asking about it. She said it would be another week or two. Another month or so passed and I was about to ask again when she posted it. I wasn't worried though, because I've been watching her for a while and knew that she would come through with the art and she had a public spreadsheet that let me know where I was on her queue.

Depends on the artist, and it depends on the art--I'd expect an artist doing stained glass to take longer and thus perhaps have slower updates than someone doing a pencil sketch. But generally, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a reply within a week. Over a month and I start to worry.

Depends on their backlog and kind of picture.

If they have a public queue I normally don't message them if I can see where I'm on the list AND they're following an order, however if they begin to finish those that came after me I would contact them inmediately, if they finish another picture without a reply, then I'd message them again, specially if it's something they can finish quickly, like a sketch or speed painting.

If they don't have a public backlog and the picture is complex (like a really detailed painting) I'd message them once a month if they don't message me first. Or sooner if they're uploading lots of pics.

If the artist is really active on the site but doesn't take one or two minutes to respond to your message (not eve necessarily with a wip), I'd be concerned.

If they set a firm deadline. Not 'I usually take X time' but "I will have it done X date', and they pass it, then I note them.

Otherwise it's usually 3 weeks to a month with no contact from them.

I will usually ask every month or so.

However if I send them an inquiry and they don't respond at all to it? I will wait a week and ask them to please answer my question. Fortunately, I've only had that happen once and the artist in question was obviously active and speaking to new clients. She was just ignoring previous clients.

However long you decide to wait make sure they get a message before the paypal chargeback window closes.

I'm not sure on wait time myself, but if it's done by emails, it can sometimes fail to send, so it's always possible they didn't get it. Or it sometimes happen they see the message, but are unable to reply at the time and forget. It's happened to me a couple times, so sometimes a poke is all is needed to check if they received it.

The only time I ever contacted an artist and requested a status update was when I commissioned someone on etsy. After about three months, I looked at their page and saw that they had refilled their shop with new stock and had finished multiple commissions that they took on a month or so after accepting mine (according to the timestamps).

When I asked them what was going on, they replied with pictures of my commission and said "Oh, it's been finished for quite some time. I just figured you had forgotten about it since I didn't hear from you."

To this day, I still don't understand why this particular artist didn't contact me as soon as the work was done and was (apparently) waiting on me to contact them.

Anyway... I have waited as long as two years for a commission before and never felt the need to contact the artist and request a status update because I could see that they were making steady progress on their commission schedule.

About the only time I ever start to get concerned is if they go for extended periods of time without posting anything or appear to have abandoned older commissions in favor of working on newer ones.

-A-chan

Probably once a month is a good pacing, as not to seem like you're harassing or being too impatient - but that's just me. Though, that being said, I've contacted an artist several times since November and have had no response. Going to have to start making a beware on them, because I've just been flat-out ignored.