What I've Learned #1
Painting is not the only big money maker in game, there are others.
Mansion Option
Painting - obvious choice, requires "marketable" and "creative visionary". If you are going for portrait museum value, this is the best one.
Handiness - I love this skill. Once you get to level 7, go to granite falls and learn the camping mascot blueprint. The little tiny mascot is fast to make, and the value is more consistent than paintings. Of course you will need "marketable", but you can skip "creative visionary".
Cooking - cupcake machine / sell to local bakery. Use the oven to level cooking, only use the cupcake machine to make money after you reach level 10. You can make "baconing" a level 8 recipe, with "marketable" the price range is around $300-$800. Cooking makes less money than all the other skills I list here, but I love the cooking skill because it is so easy to level.
Baking - cupcake machine / sell to local bakery. You can use the oven or machine to level, not a huge difference in leveling speed. At level 10, you can make "eclairs", with "marketable" trait the price range is around $1000-$1500. Due to a bug, baking is very hard to level. If you do choose baking, I suggest using the club baking perk.
Photography - ugh! Now this skill makes a lot of money, if you can handle sitting there on your computer hitting the take photograph action and clicking "c" on your keyboard like a million times. It takes very little game time, but a huge amount of real life time, is it worth it? I don't think so, but others might say it is. Sims 4 photography is also very dumb (unlike sims 3), the subject doesn't matter. Remember back in sims 3 where you take a picture of the dragon cave and you get like a super valuable photo? Well, in sims 4 taking a photo of beautiful scenery vs a photo of a plain floor = no difference. If you just want money, open your inventory click on camera to take picture, then hit "c" to capture photo 5 times, rinse and repeat. Each outstanding photo is about $20-30, so 5 photos can net you $150 - just keep repeating that and you will be a millionaire. I feel like I have aged 10 years doing some test runs using photography to make money, so not worth it. This skill absolutely ruins the game for me.
Retail Option
Same skills as mansion option above, because you will need the store to be worth $100,000. You don't have to make money through retail, you can make money through painting and just transfer it to retail store when you are ready. Although you need to work the retail store for retail perk points, but what you sell doesn't matter - you can sell literally anything, just need to sell and move the items so you can get perk points.
Alien Option
If you are worried about not having enough whim points for this option, don't worry. Go level cooking or baking, seriously these 2 skills have so many whim wishes it's unbelievable. Personally I like cooking because baking is harder to level. Have your alien sim with the master chef aspiration active (important), so you can get a maximum of 3 cooking whim wishes (1 blue emotion one, and 2 white regular ones). If you don't choose master chef aspiration, you will only get one blue cooking whim and one regular white cooking whim. Choosing that aspiration allows for 2 regular white cooking whims. You don't have to finish the master chef aspiration, just need to have that as the active aspiration. Cancel all the non cooking whims, I manage to get 14,000 whim points in just 4 sim days. It is that good.
