Definitely a hobby. I've accepted the occasional donation, but that's all. I don't think I'd care to get to a place where I *had* to do it. Creating artwork is an outlet for me, and I want to keep it that way
Re: Testing Sig
The background of Laneea's sig is an aerial view of Stormwind, with a slight addition to the sky to add some clouds. I used the wow world map viewer to position myself over Stormwind and get the pic I wanted. I doubt you'd be able to get that particular view from inside the game itself, unless you can fly
The background of my sig is from Zul'Gurub (I think). It is intended to be the sacrificial altar that is part of our background story (still in progress). I use the wow world map viewer to get the image, since the altar itself is deep inside the instance somewhere, and there's no way I could get there in-game just yet, and even if I did it would have NPCs around it which would spoil the image I wanted. The next installment of our story (which I'm in the process of writing), will feature the sacrificial altar rather prominently, so I thought it would make a great backdrop for our current sigs.