Occasionally I allow visitors to choose a piece of stone from the pile and task me to produce anything they like out of it. This is a cheap way to commission me (the price in this case was a mere £70).
The great thing about this approach is that it requires me to work fast and loose. This results in much less self-conscious work that often captures that something good that I could never deliberately achieve.
The stone used for this piece was rescued from a local stonemason company's skip