Suichiro

Tell me what it is BW! Is it the ears? Is it the tail? Is it the vinyl and fishnetting? I can do that! I'll wear whatever you want!

*slowly rocking back and forth in the corner, with paper cutout cat ears and messily applied lipstick*

Boy, if I knew that being confrontational would get me smut, then I wouldn't have held back all these years!

Yes, that was me holding back all this time.

You know, I'm not sure anymore. Photoshop's noise filter changed a lot since I played around with it commonly. What I do as a get-around for stuff like that, is I make a separate file with a low DPI and large size, create the effect like that and then blow it up to the proper size. This never works with anything that requires detail, but with insubstantial things like light, rain and glowy stuff, you can get by in a pinch.

Try running filters on your glow layer, abusing the hue and saturation tool, distorting it, etc. It's neat all the things you can do via photoshop, if you know how to run it.

Make a black layer, fill it with large pixels of noise, run a vertical motion blur on it. Set it to screen, instant rain. Then just 'erase' the areas where you don't want the rain with a black paintbrush.

Most artists don't play this game. Assume that they do not.

See the above.

When it comes to working with other people, there are guidelines you follow. These are not opinions. If you don't make the minimum amount of effort needed, the bad art you get will be your fault. I will personally laugh at you when you're unsatisfied with your commissioned works.

So that's basically, "I want help, Art Forum~!" "Get better refs." "Too much work, no." Nice.

Your current refs are too dark. It's very difficult to tell where the edges of the red flame and the blue costume is, because the colors are too saturate and they vibrate. It's very hard to get a look at the details of the outfit. The pictures are small and not conductive to showing me what I need to know in order to draw him. Your descriptions are confusing. 'Clear' in the logo means that the blue matches the rest of the outfit, it doesn't mean clear. Shiny, but not reflective? Confusing. You mean reflective, but not mirrored. The beard showing through his mask is totally absurd. How does that work? Is the mask painted on, or is it a fabric? How do his glasses attach to his mask? Is there really a hole for skin to show through in his mask, or do the glasses work into the mask flush?

There are a lot of things here that don't read well and are not clear. It's your job to communicate these details to the artist and you're not doing a good job of it right now. You don't need to spend big bucks on a character bible and turnaround, but you DO need to invest more effort into making your refs clear. You could likely find someone here on the art forum to help you out, if not even do a chara bible for you. For for the love of god, do *something* more than you are now.