Hey friends! I've been doing a lot of soul searching and a whole kind-of self-reflective shake-up of myself and my artwork and where I'd like to be in the next year as an illustrator and a professional. I've discovered this sort of problem that I keep circling which is namely just a question, really. The question is, how do I become a real professional illustrator?
So, I've decided rather than to try to answer this question in some sort of one off explosion of information, I'd take you through my journey and hopefully we can all come out learning something in the end, even if I fail massively.
I guess I need to first answer the question of how did I get to where I'm at now? I started drawing when I was young and did it more as a hobby and a creative way of procrastinating away my time that I should have been doing math homework. As I grew up, I somehow decided that the idea of being a professional artist was "not realistic". I'm not sure if this was upbringing or world influence or a combination of everything, but somewhere in my tiny twelve year old brain I decided that art was just for "fun" and couldn't be a real job. Sadly, I accepted this idea as truth for a long time and set my pens and pencils aside with only the occasional "hobby" piece being accomplished from time to time.
From age 15 to about age 28 I struggled with the recurring urge to devote myself to what I thought was frivolously wasted time creating, sketching and painting. I also had a competing hobby of music, but I decided overall that art was easier, less expensive and more fun to do... and portable. My interest in art took over once I experienced my first MMORPG and saw the opportunities that were coming available for artist across this new digital realm of game creation. For the last five years I've immersed myself in game art, mobile interface art, and the endless sea of online tutorials. After the hundreds of hours of youtube videos, podcasts, tutorials, blogs and more, I've come to find some sort of general directional arrow that may or may not be leading me to the valid information on how to "make it" as an artist.
Surprisingly, things are not what I thought they were. Some things are ridiculously easier than I imagined and some things are horribly difficult. All in all I think I'm heading some direction that seems to be positive. So, in the next few blogs I'm going to focus about some of my struggles, some of the obstacles I've had to face and some of the absolutely wrong information I've had to struggle to unlearn in order to make progress thus far.
I'm really hopeful for what progress 2014 has the potential to bring!
