If I Really Was a Painter?

I'd have to sell my paintings for about a grand each to actually quit looking for a "real" job. That's pretty lame. That is my productivity or laziness is pretty lame.

I wondered how much my paintings actually do make? So I averaged all the non-vetta paintings I sell on iStock per month by the number of paintings, and i make $1.50/painting/month. Obviously i could adapt my style or subject to try and be more marketable. But that is quite a bit of guesswork.

A buck and a half seems like such a low number, but maybe consciously being marketable and then adding a lot of paintings every month would quickly add up to a reasonable number?

If i worked 20 eight hour days per month and made 1 painting per hour, after a year the portfolio would have over 2000 paintings. If it was still performing at $1.50/painting/month, that would be encouraging enough I think, to continue.

But there a lot of risk around the $1.50. That number of paintings might water down each painting's performance? On the other hand I might have to consider other venues for selling paintings, like etsy.

Okay I'm going off on a huge what-if tangent when the biggest uncertainty is actually my own discipline and painting 8 hours a day. To actually make painting my job. As long as I don't compromise looking for a "real" job, It might be interesting to see if I can be a real painter in the meanwhile.

Peru study

Even though I haven't been painting much lately, I'm still super stoked about contributing to my friend's Outreach Peru gala silent auction. My other friend is also letting me use her travel pictures as photo references, which is super nice and cool. Above is the first attempt.

I like a lot of things about this little study, but on the other hand it still looks a little weak. The terraces in the bottom left don't seem quite right. Maybe they need to be more opaque or I didn't get the perspective quite right? I paid a lot of attention trying to give the painting depth, by making the distant areas light and mauve-ish and the closer areas darker. But I think I need to do more of this as well as blurring the distant horizons.