Is there any artist here?

The oily, sticky kind that comes out like a smoothie is best for consistent lines, diarrhea is good for filling large areas but you usually only get one or the other.

I've had a successful career in the arts, and I can tell you point blank it does not involve sacrificing your passion in order to make an income. What it does involve is using your creativity to steer your talents towards a marketable demand and recognize that, in and of itself, it involves compromising your vision but not necessarily the fun aspects of being involved in the arts.

So take me for example, I do mixed media which involves learning about a wealth of materials including plasters, lime based shit, tints compounds, HVLP, and chemically activated rust, decoupage, collage, murals etc etc...I was able to do a bunch of research, look into where my interests would apply (and you have to be super, super MF liberal with where you look) and was able to find a niche teaching and working at a studio for creative wall finishings for interior decoration. A lot if it employed the same techniques & it was a fantastic job. Of course there were elements of it that sucked. It was a job ffs, but a large part of it was being given a giant warehouse full of weird materials that I had never worked with and/or hadnt been approved & I got to play half the day away being creative...to create "finishes" for my studio that they owned if they approved them. But I was a mad scientist in a lab & I got to keep all my tinctures.

In my spare time, I was able to afford the tools to do my own artwork and use materials I got from my studio, many for free, to explore totally new techniques. I taught adult art classes for senior citizens and at a rec center for fun and minor pay & that was a blast. Also got paid to teach people in full time classes & to sit in on other teachers classes for free.

Recession hit & that studio closed along with the world of crazy wall finishes for the most part, which is really a luxury for rich people. So I used the skills I learned there to get into woodworking and crazy artistic furniture refinishing. That was a huge market during the recession, because people were looking to refinish and flip houses without replacing woodwork. That's an art in and of itself, working with different woods and stains and woodworking techniques. Tbh some of the finishes we had to create on the fly were epic and crazy. Some lady wanted pounded copper inlay with no price so we had to layer plasters and press our thumbs into it to imitate the look. Along with carefully applied patina. One person wanted their shutters to resemble some aged piece of furniture from a temple in Thailand. It was all over the place, plus there was the actual craft of carpentry, and I was able to learn for free from skilled mfers. I know fuck all, but I know more than I started with & I started refinishing pieces of real wood furniture off Ebay priced at fuck all with handpainted art/etching & selling that for fun. You can make a huge return if you know the basics of how to sand/prep/treat & finish woodwork & you can paint kooky shit on it & make bank...as a hobby.

I was able to make plenty of money being creative. Having fun. Thinking outside the box. None of it was what I wanted to create, but it was awesome, and I loved the job, aside from the tedium of preparation and site management, but that's true with your own art as well.

In the meantime I had a blast with social art projects, like creating challanges for my friends when we were drinking on weekends to make the most retarded art possible & go to a art festival with real retard art history theories and speeches & try to sell it to people. One guy had a giant ball of dog hair and did a bunch of research into outsider art. People stood there and listened as if he was profound af lol. I actually sold a giant piece of plastic that I had used as a palate to mix paints for a million years cause it looked so abstract expressionism. Jackson Pollack moment MF

Even during the pandemic when I thought I'd lost art for good, I for fun created a group of whiny musicians I knew and made up an evil set of rules and trolling in order to inspire those who couldn't be inspired to play because they were cut off from their community & wallowing. It turned into an insane and epic contest, with amazing and horrific pieces created just so they could stay in it & a ton of people I dont even know joined. And it was a shitshow of epic proportions, but we all made shit! And challenged each other and talked massive shit and learned obscuria about music. I even owned those mfers by befriending a dark horse genius dude musician who helped me troll them to pieces.

I've made art for people on this site. I've participated in crazy pop up gallery shit. Ive done art simply to troll art to mf bits. I know of musicians who have used their synth/computer bs to create stupid yoga soundtracks to bank (pay for) what they really want to do I know illustrators that make furry porn to pay for their own projects. I've lost it and found it and lost it and found it again.

If you want to he creative, get creative about finding a way. It's not a here nor there or a this or that. Artists can make fucking BS into art (Marcel Duchamp moment) To quote ian malcom from the late great JP, [art} it...uh...finds a way"