>>400Reaching mentally ill people was one of the primary goals of doing my art, actually. As for how I made money before commissions (which have actually started rolling in finally these last two weeks 0u0), I was selling prints for cheap because I was dating a man who worked at a print shop and could produce them at no cost to me. I no longer have that resource, so I'm just doing commissions now for a base rate of 12 dollars, 15 if the design is complex or has a detailed background.
As far as tips go, the primary thing most people struggle with is the dullness of wax pastels and crayons. A good way to avoid this is to buy a lot of crayons, and sharpen them frequently whenever you need a crisp, dark line. The sharper the point of the wax, the darker and thinner the mark will be. Going over lines more than once can help with this as well, but may thicken them if your crayon is dull. To sharpen crayons, I use a pencil-sharpener that has a wide-angle opening like the larger aperture in this pic, which will fit a standard size crayon or wax pastel.
The second thing people struggle with is what to buy. I use professional wax pastels for important colors that need to be high quality, like black and white, or any that don't appear in a standard crayola lineup, like blood red or deep indigo, while using Crayola colors for any other pigments I might need, just to save money. Neocolor's white is very good at smearing crayon wax to create the effect like in this commission I just finished (the bridge over the canal). Finally, if you desperately need to cover a large area with a dark color like black, the giant art crayon is your friend. The wax is much softer and thus goes on much darker, much quicker. Be careful about smudges though, because the higher quality pastels are meant to be blendable, unlike the Crayola ones. (They are VERY greasy 0u0;;;)
Correcting mistakes is also a common complaint with the medium, as it isn't easy. Provided you use thick toothy paper like you should, if you make a mark you don't want, the best thing you can do is scrape a little of the paper fibers away with a very sharp knife to reveal the clean ones underneath, and then make your mark again properly. This isn't useful for scraping away large mistakes, and will never yield a completely blank surface, as it grinds some of the pigment in. So make sure you've sketched everythi
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.