Hey I am wanting to level up my Artificing on my Sentinel but everytime I start to gather resources and want to craft I get down to 1000 credits or so. I am also not a high enough level to make any profit on the auction house. Advice? Also, first post on the site. Finally registered.

Welcome!
 
Best tip there is gather your own materials.
Chances are you're always a planet behind them (I know I was) but its the cheapest way for sure.
 
What do you need money for by the way? As long as you can buy your skills and a speeder (at least rank 1) you should be fine.
If you quest for a planet (perhaps pick up materials for a lower tier and sell those?) and ignore companion crew missions you'll be sky high in credits again.

I agree, if you can find them grab them is the best way.

If you are looking for a relative fast way to make some credits and you have your ship. Do the space flight missions. I seem to be getting some decent money from them.

Edit: Also welcome to the site.

Also after doing a few of the crafting experiences with just about all of them to somewhere in the 10-20 character range, I can say that there's a lot of the recipes hidden away in the crafting. The ones you get from the trainers are usually the common ones but the more advanced crafting recipes will only show up by reverse engineering the stuff you find and/or make. By far the easiest ones seem so far to be tied to the scavenging gathering skill (armorsmith, armstech & cybertech) as you will often run across droids that you can harvest for a few extra scavenging materials.

It's probably stabilized by now, but when I had Archaeology, tablet fragments (or whatever theyre called, the ones thats arent crystals :P) were selling pretty decently.

Power crystals can be decent, but the main one to avoid actually sending companions to get is color crystals. They sell for absolute shit, which makes sense given they have the least stat bonuses of the available item mods (hilt, mod, enhancement, etc.)

This pretty much goes for everything anyway though; sending your followers on costly missions instead of gathering the mats yourself will always leave you strapped for cash. As far as profit goes, I believe Artifice makes color crystals and enhancements; stick to enhancements. Make the green ones, disenchant (reverse-engineer) them until you learn the blue and (hopefully) purple recipes. These are what will sell.

Either check the GTN for the blue/purple mats requires to make these, to see if you can still make a profit even buying them. Otherwise take up the "rare" gathering Mission skill for it. Don't quote me on it, but I think it's Treasure Hunting? Check your Codex under Artifice to make sure. Hope this helps.

Oh and yes, welcome to the forums!

Best tip? Don't bother with crafting until 50; credits are extremely easy to gain at that point, so you never have to worry about running out.

@TaliciaDragonsong: 
 
You actually need to be able to afford rank 2 of your speeder at 40(or whatever the level was), that is HUGE, it might not sound like a big speed increase, and it isn't, but what the game doesn't tell you is that the rank 2 speeder has shields on it, so you won't get knocked off nearly as fast when a mob you're just trying to drive by hits you. Rank 2 speeder makes questing a lot more pleasant.

@TaliciaDragonsong: Wow's were 60 and 100 percent speed increase, SWTOR is 90 and 110 percent.

I really disagree. I was constantly thanking my speeder at 40+ for how much time it saved me not fighting unneeded mobs.