Upolu Island, Samoa, and an announcement about my art career

I think I'm on a Pacific kick with my artwork. My last piece was a mountain in New Zealand, and today I'm drawing crystal-clear waters off of Upolu Island, Samoa. I got the original off of a Google search, make the jump to see it:

So, a couple comments. I think my color work's improved some since last time. I consciously paid closer attention to the actual color of the image. But there are still differences. The photo is just crisper. The crystal-clear waters are slightly murkier in my version. The real sky is a tiny shade bluer, the water a little more sparkling with a bit more reflected light. But these, I feel, are mostly accounted for by the choice of medium and style of using that medium itself. It's incredibly hard to be crisp and exact with colored pencils if your aim is full saturation of the paper. I tried with great difficulty to do it for the star labels in Carta Caela, and for the first time since being a little kid, decided not to completely saturate that part for legibility's sake.

Colored pencils in full saturation, as I have come to use them, have strengths and weaknesses. My colored pencil of choice is Crayolas because they're cheap and blend well, which led me to this form of art as a logical extension of that. They're more exact than painting for most people, but still retain a hint of the impressionistic, like painting does. You can only ever be so exact; there's a granularity present that cannot be escaped. Some effects work the same in both colored pencilling and painting; a single stroke laying down a blade of color can do all kinds of duty and in both cases seems to be the fundamental artistic unit of any piece. It can be a wave pattern, the busy leaves of a forest, the silver lining in a cloud. Unlike painting, the color blending is done on the paper, not on a palette. But the final appearance is similar.

It's probably a hopeless quest to get too exact; it would turn this from an art into a science. There is always going to be an inherent unreality to any art I draw, and the art is in making that unreality speak to an intangible reality. What do my little changes say about the piece, about the mood? In choosing what things to render inaccurately in order to render other things accurately, what is the mood I'm trying to convey?

It's been a long time since I've drawn sunny daytime skies. The complicated melancholy of sunset, the neon vividness of night, are inherently more compelling subjects to me. Daytime just seems so... just so. But I appear to be good at it.

In any case, I've floated a trial balloon among you lot to find out what kind of business model I should adapt to sell my art. I've gotten a lot of general cash support from people who weren't interested in buying anything, but wanted to support my work in general. So I think I'm going to hop on Patreon and release high-resolution images of my artwork for the personal use of anyone who gives me, say, five dollars a month. That price should keep my work affordable to most, and relieves me of the financial burden of making or selling prints. Furthermore, if all you want is some interesting wallpapers, it's accessible this way as-is.

This will be complemented, I think, by selling the original artwork on eBay once I have a large enough Patreon base to get reasonable compensation for each work.

Thanks to everyone who donated, and helped me figure out the path forward! And if you reading this would like to get in on the action, you can send me cash through PayPal, and when I have a Patreon up and running, I'll drop the link to it for anyone interested. As always, the money raised is basically my payday, and how I'll be financing the construction of my agricultural collective. Thanks again!