Caricatures!

Somehow male and female faces
each have their own caricature.

Ladies have bigger eyes, smaller, (though not shorter) noses, and small lips,
and they are squished together towards the bottom.

Germs on the other hand have their eyes bigger, noses shortened,
and lips can even stay the same size.

It is cuteness for ladies,
and humor for gentlemen.

And I invite everyone to think of this as a starting point,
by the time you reach your tenth caricature, you will have a much better theory than mine.

As with all things there is an exception,
and it is wonderfully ridiculous.

You will find this tool in GIMP, Krita's older sister (also free and open source),
and the tool is called warp transform.

Pay close attention to the tool options,
as the topmost dropdown lets you choose: Move Pixels, Grow Area, Shrink Area, Swirls, Erase, and Smooth.

Here you can liquefy a photo, smoothly enlarge eyes,
shrink the lips, warp without destruction photo.

The image once distorted, is little more than a low effort meme,
but when you take the distorted image to Krita...

Trace and paint and decorate it,
you are in business... pun intended.

I think just offering realistic portraits,
cuts you of from a lot of giggles and potential customers.

Even if foolishness is beneath you,
you may still need to practice it just to support your business.

It will make you laugh,
and that is always worth it.

Here I wanted to explain why my source image, is not perfect,
especially to those who are just joining in.

It is just photo reference, a quick sketch,
to see if the final product will look silly enough.

It does not need to be perfect,
because to make a beautiful caricature, we must make a digital painting out of it.

It is not just to paint the shapes of the eyes and nose,
it also serves as color reference.

The correct color chose,
is as important as the shape.

Wrong colors will absolutely destroy a painting,
portraits are special because you always have photo reference.

Close enough,
is not good enough for color.

Portraits and caricatures, are a fine start,
one more thing that is needed here are backgrounds.

I recommend abstract backgrounds,
making your portraits look like they are bursting out of a paint explosion.

Lastly, a word on sales,
you should be able to sell portraits for $50 dollars.

They may take about five hours at first,
but that will eventually become one or two.

It hurts to say it,
but the platforms that will sell your art will take a huge cut.

Though some platforms will give the customer an option to have your digital paintings framed,
the process of framing occurs after the sale is made.

There is no warehouse to store your framed paintings,
it costs you nothing.

The sales platforms will demand exclusive access to your painting,
that means you can't sell the same painting on two services, but you can sell different ones.

As to running your own platform,
yes, that is why you shouldn't stop at Art.

This is not as awful as it sounds,
because you can build a program where people upload their photos and watch you work on the paintings of people ahead of them - until it is their turn.

Beyond that, you may with to build an application that will let others join your website,
and sell their works, where you can take a small percent of their sales.

The cut that the popular platforms take is too big,
so if you just take 5% percent then you can get a lot of sign-ups.

The main problem with hosting your own software are hackers,
so you will need to monitor for snooping, and use an off-site credit card processor with its own security, like Stripe.

The programming you do on your own is only ever for prototyping and learning,
once things get series, you will need investors, and programmers that will do all the programming for you.

It all begins,
with some silly art.