within the last few years, a practice i've taken to using frequently is to use my own admittedly meager skills to sketch out pose and outfit concepts whenever i plan to get a commission from someone. it's been a lot of fun; i've found that i really like designing outfits. for example: Acid Shark's fit was basically entirely conceptualized by me before i handed it off to any artists.
sometimes this is because I have a Specific Vision in mind. Take, for example, this art of my OC Catherine Sophalo by @audioerf, compared to the outfit reference I'd come up with.
this was a very specific design i had in mind for this character and i know from experience that sometimes trying to specify exactly what you're looking for in text is less than ideal. as such, i decided to take pen to paper and sketch out the exact idea i was holding in my mind's eye. it's easy to see from the outcome that this was an incredibly successful decision.
another situation this is good for is when you want to spare the poor artist the stress of having to figure out a particularly complicated design. take this piece of Acid Shark in cosplay as the character Strife from Darksiders, done recently by @teamcatple.
Strife's helmet is meant to be worn on a head that is, ostensibly, human-shaped. but uh-oh, Acid Shark's head is distinctly not human shaped! so what do you do to ensure that the either you send the artist a ref just like, welp, good luck! or you do what i did and say "hold up i got this" and design it yourself. And as you can see, the result speaks for itself. in that it's really good.
Now this is one I haven't actually sought to commission yet, but recently I've been trying to figure out what to do with a group of adoptables I bought forever ago and then unfortunately never did anything with. I've seen a lot of folks making fun TTRPG style adventuring party characters recently and thought it might be a fun way to do something with these characters. And thus did I set out to design an outfit and weapon for the one I plan to make the Tank of the group.
This is what got me thinking about this whole tangent in the first place, simply because I had so much fun putting this together! And like, at the end of the day, this isn't just a method for helping the artists you commission along with what you're looking for from them, it can also be a lot of fun to just figure this stuff out on your own and Participate In The Divine Act Of Creation.