Let me go back to my point #1 and show you how asking all 10 guys to do a free piece of spec work hurts everyone:

Developers already complain that artists charge too much by the hour. I get people telling me that $40/hr. sounds high. Well, it would be high if I was working on staff at a company, but aside from the fact that I pay for my own workspace/equipment ($450 computer repair bill just this month), there are a whole lot of non-billable hours a freelancer has to put in. My posts to IndieGamer are not pure recreation – being helpful to people attracts attention, like this blog of yours, which helps get work. I have to spend time on portfolio pieces. I probably spend an average of an hour or two a day writing emails to contacts and potential clients, and communicating with clients about current jobs (which I don’t bill for). At some point, I’ll have to build my website, since it’s a shambles at the moment. Sometimes there are dry spells when no work comes in. These are all hours that I’d be paid for working at a company. All that downtime means that $40/hr. for the paid hours actually comes out to more like $10-15/hr. overall. I’m certainly not getting fat off what I charge.

Let’s say an average job is 20-30 hours. Maybe the spec work you ask for only takes an hour… but what if every potential client did as you suggest, and asked 10 different freelancers for a free sample? That’s 10 extra unpaid hours for a 20-30 hour job (whether you want to look at it as 10 different people doing 1 hour for 1 job, or the fact that each freelancer has to do 10 free samples to get one job, on average). That means that they’d have to charge 33-50% more per hour! If I accepted such requests, I’d have to ask $55-60/hr., and would probably get no work at all.

If you ask for spec, you’re going to drive away most of the more professional artists, or get little more than a quick sketch from them. Only the hobbyists can afford to put in the time to do a proper job on something they only stand a 10% chance of getting paid for.

On the other hand, what you can do, that will help everyone, instead of hurting them, is if you see a portfolio that looks nice, but doesn’t contain anything close to what you want, email the artist and ask him if he’s done anything of the sort.

Chances are he has… most artists try to keep their portfolios trim, rather than piling in everything they’ve ever done. They also tend to use their personal work more than stuff for clients, since it doesn’t have anyone else’s fingerprints on it and shows their own style better (though obviously they put some of the latter in, to show that they have clients!). It’s entirely possible that he’s done something similar to what you want, but just didn’t put it on his website.

If he hasn’t done anything of the sort, he might tell you that it’s just not his bag. On the other hand, your question might draw his attention to the fact that he has a “hole” in his portfolio, and he might want to plug that hole. In that case, he might ask you to give him a week, and whip up a portfolio piece to serve as an example.

That’s different from you asking him for spec work, because it’s voluntary, and more useful to the artist, since he can make whatever piece he feels will be best for his portfolio, not for getting this specific job.

Even if he doesn’t have time to do it now, and you have to pass on him for the current job, you’ve done him a service by letting him know there’s a demand for something not in his current portfolio, and if he’s filled the hole by the time you’re working on your next project, maybe you’ll hire him then.