Alarin... The social value of someone exchanging your money for food is incredibly high... However, because it is such an easy career to be involved in (it just takes an application and successful interview at a fast food chain or grocery store), the social value of the individual changing your money into food is incredibly low. Human social value is just as controlled by supply vs demand as any other good and service.
Willingness and ability both control the adjusted value of each person's social value... The easier the job, the lower the pay. The trick is to find some way to increase the value beyond the normal level that others are willing to give.
One story of this is a 'special needs' person... born with slight mental retardation... who worked at a grocery store bagging groceries. He had the opportunity to attend a company sponsored propaganda seminar, and he actually picked up on some of the more subtle advice, and found a way to add value to his job of bagging groceries... He slipped in a piece of paper with some message of the day into one of each customer's bags. When the customers noticed it, they valued having this person being their bagger to such a degree that people were willing to wait in his line, no matter how long it was, even if there were other lines with nobody in them. The story doesn't say whether he got a raise or not (I certainly hope that he did), but it did show that even a small addition of value has a lot of social weight.
As far as art... Who values art the most? Advertisers, the opulent, and other artists, mostly... My grandfather raised the value of his art by painting in styles that appealed to other artists (not to mention, to himself
), which set him apart from the general 'noise' of other artists. He was a decently well known artist in Arizona, getting some of his paintings into the Phoenix Art Museum, and was able to retire without being a starving artist, though he never really did retire. (He painted until the day of his last trip to the hospital, and his only regret was that he couldn't get one more painting finished.) That reminds me, I need to work on the scripting for an online gallery for his art... Ahhh, the power of procrastination.
I'm not saying that you have to change your illustrations into "Artist's Art," but it is an area that could use some very imaginative, creative people...