Am I an Artisit?

O.K. I have been hanging out at deviantart, having discovered both the magic and tedium of groups back in early December. devianart is home to many awesomely talented inviduals, who my humble technical skills to shame. However, I find trying to keep with the firehose of 1000+ new Fantasy NPC portraits a week, even worse than tracking my the 200+ blogs on my blog roll. I also found that looking at a 1000+ portraits in thumbnail dims my interest in them. I was wowed by the artistry of many of the maps and battle mats. However, I discovered on closer examination that some of them are pieced together from other peoples clip art. The maps seem to issue at the much more reasonable pace of 10-30 new ones a week. If I did that I could have cool maps too! Unfortunately the gaming rhythm I have fallen into involves drawing the battlemat for Sunday's game on Sunday afternoon, lends itself to drawing with colored wet erase markers on my vinyl battle mat. I have been taking photographs of the battle mats before erasing them off for next's week game, so I can deviantart them up sometime in the future. I have also posted some of the raw photos to my deviantart site directly, but since I feel humbled by the things on other sites I have been doing this sparingly. Devianart seems to make a bright line distinction between ametuer and proffesional artists. Am I a proffesional artist? My art has graced the cover of things sold for cash, but I didn't get any money for it. The item "Myroun Island" was a tournment prepared for the MINI-CON 1980 at Seatle University. It exists in less a hundred copies. I know because I took the master to the Kwik copy myself Saturday, and ordered as many a would make the best price break, cost was under $2.00 each. Because we were on deadline and desperate we took the map I had prepared for the tournment DMs and pasted it on the cover. Although the copyright status of "Myroun Island" is in limbo, belonging to a orginization which no longer exists, I feel comfortable publishing my own artwork. Behold "Myroun Island"

Copies of "Myroun Island" sold less than six. She-who-must-be-obeyed is still sore because we buried the cost of publication in her publications committee budget instead of the MINI-CON budget. However, by doing so we were able to show a slight profit for the MINI-CON and convince the club to go on to orginize the much bigger Dragon Flight, so I deem it a nessesary evil. So that leaves my career as a "professional" artist rapidly approaching the sales and earnings of Vincent Van Gogh (total one painting sold during his lifetime for 400 francs).