Hey guys, it's Celestia, and no, I didn't clickbait you; I, a professional artist,
am actually about to tell you why you shouldn't make art your job. The blatant hypocrisy is not
lost on me. That said, I do have every intention of clarifying what I mean by that, because there's
obviously a lot more nuance to the topic than "art job bad, hobby art good". But before I do,
let me take a moment to thank today's sponsor, XPPen. XPPen has generously provided this month's
giveaway prize: their Artist 10 2nd generation drawing tablet, which they let me try out
beforehand, and in doing so, I learned that this tablet is just way cooler than I've ever seen a
tablet be. Possibly the coolest thing is that it's not a pen tablet OR a pen display tablet,
it's actually both: you can switch between modes depending on how you prefer to draw,
which is a feature I've never seen before, and was really impressed by. Another very
cool aspect is that you don't just have to use it to draw, you can even connect a Switch to it
for gaming if you want to play on a bigger screen but don't have a TV available. It has a 10.1 inch
screen that's fully laminated with an anti-glare, paper-like texture, which you guys know I love,
and has six express keys, which you know I love more. Mine are programmed to zoom in and out,
undo and redo, and switch between my eraser and pen, but they're really easy to reprogram to suit
your own personal preferences, too. It comes in four different colors: mine is pink because I'm
basic, and it's one of my favorite colors. It has zero pen lag and excellent calibration, and the
pen uses XPPen's new X3 chip technology, which means it's pretty much just all around better
than older pen models that still use springs and have those super movable, wiggly nibs. There's
honestly nothing about this tablet that I don't like, and they aren't paying me for this at all,
so you'd better know that I mean it. You can enter to win this tablet by commenting "don't touch my
bread government" on this video in addition to your preferred method of contact if you win,
and a winner will be drawn via random number generator on December 1st 2022. Once drawn,
I will either notify the winner by commenting back on their original comment or via the method they
specified, and they will have 72 hours to respond before a new winner is drawn. Thank you so much
to XPPen for sponsoring this video and providing such an awesome prize, and I hope whoever wins it
enjoys it just as much as I do. Now, all that aside, let's get into the video. Like I said,
I AM going to tell you why you shouldn't make art your job, but I want to get a few things out
of the way right off the bat: these are just my opinions based on the very individual experiences
that I've had, and will not be applicable to all types of art careers, or even everyone
pursuing the same kind of one that I have. A lot of the issues that prompted my opinions
are very unique to the specific career path of a freelance illustrator and content creator,
and other paths can be completely different. More specifically, animators and contract-based
industry artists, while they have their own share of problems unique to those fields,
probably won't face a lot of the problems that I'm going to talk about today. So with that in mind,
if you're planning on pursuing those paths instead, making art your job might not be a
bad plan, although I'd encourage you to do some research into the downfalls those artists face
instead beforehand, because there's no shortage. Most of what I'll talk about today will only be
relevant to those of you interested in freelance illustration and/or content creation as a career,
and even then, I'm not telling you straight up that you shouldn't pursue that career,
I'm saying there are a lot of aspects of it that I wish someone had warned me about before I decided
to pursue it, and I want to be that person to tell as many of you as possible, so that your decision
is as informed as possible. I don't necessarily regret becoming a professional artist, but I
do think that if I'd known everything I know now back when it was just my dream, I might have gone
a different direction. So why should you not make art your job? Well, if you're anything like I was,
because you probably have a handful of very inaccurate misconceptions about what that job
will actually be like, and pursuing it anyway will give you some very harsh wake-up calls,
probably one right after the other. Like when Dan Avidan said "life is a repeated, endless kick to
the nuts, and when you think you've got the hang of it, life is like "hey, I got these new boots
I'd like to try out on your nuts", and I-- I am really making freelance illustration out to
be the steamiest pile of sh*t right now. It's-- it's really not, there are just a lot of things
about it that do suck, and they're things I wasn't prepared for, so I want you to be. That in mind,
let's get into the biggest misconceptions about art as a job that I had, and what the reality
of the situation actually is that might make that job less appealing. And the first one is the idea
that being an artist professionally is just one job at all. I went into this thinking that this
career would basically just end up being doing commissions for a living or selling my existing
art for a living; in reality, if you want to make enough to live on as a freelance artist
without a day job, you need to be doing like, 10 smaller jobs at once. Commissions alone won't pay
for rent and bills unless you're getting a million, are charging very, very high rates,
and selling existing art, be it in galleries, in markets or stores, or on merch online,
would probably only ever make you enough to live on if you are regularly selling fine art paintings
for thousands of dollars, attending every possible art market in your area as a vendor, or you have
a huge following that is regularly buying all of your merch. So to supplement that, you have
to branch out even more and spread yourself out even thinner: do commissions, sell at conventions
and markets, sell merch online, start streaming, sell your artwork for content creators who need
art or assets, start making and selling brushes or textures for digital art programs, sell licenses
to use your existing work as stock art, make paid classes or tutorials, teach art, find local stores
and markets that will display and sell your stuff, and so on. It's a constant struggle to try to find
more ways to make money from your art, all the while people will sh*t all over you for trying to
make money from your art. Like you'll be sitting there trying to figure out how you can afford this
box of Kraft Dinner, and people will look you dead in the eye and say "a real artist isn't in
it for the money". But that's its own sh*tshow of an issue. My point is that doing art for work as
a freelancer isn't one job, it's a million small jobs that you hope you'll find enough of to break
even that month. For example, my monthly income is made up of commissions, ad revenue from YouTube,
sponsorships from YouTube, merch sales from my Etsy, art sales at conventions, local markets,
and events, paid art critiques for Jingsketch's Art Clinic, Patreon and Kofi, tattoo design sales,
and soon, the sale of tutorials and Procreate, brushes, stamps, and textures. It's a lot,
and it's incredibly overwhelming to manage. It is something that gets better with time,
though, like-- you start building a client base that's more stable and consistent,
your business starts growing, and things don't stay quite that shitty forever in that regard.
It's no different than a lot of small businesses, but even when it gets better on the financial
side and you're no longer a starving artist hoping to find enough work to pay the bills,
the actual job side still usually means doing a million things at once, even if those things
become easier to rely on and anticipate, and it's an incredibly chaotic, stressful, disorganized,
exhausting way to live sometimes. Most times. To the point where I regularly look at people working
nine to five jobs and think "my god, their work ends when they go home at five? My work doesn't
even end when I'm in bed". It takes up a lot of time and effort, and it can be so difficult to
separate your work life from your personal life or even make any real time for the latter at all.
I had to add two hours to all of my work days for a month in order to take one weekend off to go to
the mountains with my mom, and that's something I do maybe once a year. That's not the case for
everyone, especially for more well-adjusted people who aren't constantly obsessing over their work,
but with this career, you do kind of HAVE to sometimes if you want to advance it. The next
misconception I had about making art my job was one that was pretty aggressively taught
to me by the entirety of society, because the concept is a phrase that everyone's heard:
if you do what you love you'll never work a day in your life. I thought that because I loved making
art as much as I did, I would love making it professionally just as much. And sometimes I do,
but people don't talk nearly enough about the fact that other times, whether or not you love
making art is heavily dependent on what you actually love about art. So if what you love
about art is drawing your own ideas more than the actual process of drawing, spending the majority
of your time drawing other people's ideas for money is probably going to make you miserable.
If you do genuinely love the process just as much, you might have a great time with it. If what you
love about art is the complete creative freedom to depict a subject however you want, working on
a project with strict parameters that forces you to mimic someone else's style down to the letter
is going to be a thoroughly joyless experience for you. And that's going to be the case for any job,
I mean-- even if you love some parts of it, there are going to be other parts that you hate and you
have to do anyway, because that's life and it's unavoidable. But creative careers are often sold
to us as the exception to that rule, which makes it all the more soul-crushingly disappointing
to learn that they're not at all, and before you pursue one, I think it's unbelievably important to
analyze exactly what it is you love about making art, and how much of that you'll actually get
to do by making it your job, and how much of the aspect you don't love you're willing to do anyway
while still having that job be enjoyable to you. Because learning too late that an art job means
spending 90% of your time doing something you derive no pleasure from is horrible,
and having to keep doing it indefinitely is going to burn you out and kill your creativity faster
than you can possibly anticipate. I was talking to a friend recently who basically said doing art for
a living can be like licensing out your creativity to someone else for a price, and he wasn't wrong;
it's so hard to maintain your love for art when you're doing that, and it's even harder
to make sure you make enough time for your own personal art to avoid losing that love. The next
misconception I had about art as a job kind of goes hand in hand with that, and it's that doing
art professionally would mean pursuing my own creativity and ideas; that if I made art my job,
it would mean bringing all of the concepts and ideas that I'd been developing over the years
to life, because I mean-- I'd have the skills and the means to do so. And I do now have the skills
and means to do so; what I don't have is the time to do so. So I went into this career path
thinking that at the end of it, I would be able to make my manga, or my webcomic, or my video game,
or my art books, and in reality, I'm making those things for other people. The majority of my time
is spent making art for other people's comics and games and awesome ideas, and I have almost no time
left after doing that for my own. I've been doing art as a job seriously for six years, and my art
book still only has a few finished pieces ready for it. My manga is still nothing more than two
notebooks worth of ideas and concepts dating back 10 goddamn years. My webcomic just has a logo
and a character design and half a floor plan for the main setting. My video game has a rough map,
a shitload of concept art, and a folder's worth of planning that still hasn't turned into any
real production, because with my current workload, I get about one full day a month to work on all of
them. And the argument can absolutely be made that if I keep at this for a few more years and keep
working to advance my career, I may eventually reach a point where I can afford to make more
time for those projects and less time for the work that I do for other people, and that may very well
be true, and I guess I'll have to find out and get back to you. But the point remains that getting to
that point in your career takes a long, long time, and going into this field with the goal of doing
it soon or maybe at all, depending on whether or not you end up being able to stick it out,
will probably result in some heartbreakingly severe disappointment. It did for me. I recently
did an almost three-hour long deep dive into art school with a friend of mine named James,
a former art student which is linked in the icard above. If you're interested in hearing both of us
go over whether or not art school is valuable or worthwhile, go watch that, but the point that's
relevant to this is that he and I spent the day together for that video doing both the art school
tour and the interview, and in the interim, we talked a lot about art and our experiences with
it, and I won't go into too much detail because it's really not my place to share that detail,
but essentially, after art school, he did pursue art professionally for a while, but then decided
to stop, because having to pour all of his time, effort, and most importantly, creativity, into
work for others just to make it as a professional artist was killing his creativity, and he had no
time to make the things that he wanted or pursue his own ideas. And as soon as he stopped and chose
a different career path, he was able to find his love for art again and revive his creativity, and
now he actually has the spare time and resources to devote to the ideas that made him love it in
the first place. Now, when he has a cool art-based thing he wants to make, he can, and he can pour
his full passion into it. And like, yes, the argument could be made that he has less time than
he would probably like because of how much time he has to spend on his job, but like-- if having
an art-based job already doesn't allow you much if any spare time, is that really any worse? As far
as I'm concerned, it's better. If an art job and a non-art job are both going to limit the spare
time that you have to devote to your passions and ideas, why not do the one that limits it
less and also makes you less creatively drained? I don't know, honestly. It obviously depends on
the person and the situation and whether or not the non-art job actually DOES leave them enough
free time and whether or not they find the art job create creatively draining to begin with, and what
the priorities are, and a million other things that it would take me two million years to list,
so I won't. The point is that I can't make any definitive statement one way or the other as to
whether or not a non-art job is better than an art job in terms of allowing you the time and freedom
to pursue your art-based passions, but at least for me, I think I would rather have a non-art
job and more time to make art for me if I could do it all over again. But I can't, and that's a
hard pill to swallow at this point in my life, so if you can save yourself that pill by considering
what matters to you in this regard sooner rather than later, I cannot encourage you to enough. So
in conclusion, what am I saying here? Don't make art your job, do make art your job, what? Well,
just like when it came to discussing whether or not you should go to art school, I can't tell
you that definitively. It depends on you and what you find important and valuable, but I do really,
really want to warn you to take the decision seriously and think twice about making art your
job, because it's not necessarily everything it's cut out to be a lot of the time. I've had both
clients and friends with day jobs who have the disposable income and spare time to spend all of
it growing and improving as artists, and making everything they love, and I look at them with so
much envy, because at least in my experience and that of many others I've heard from,
that's not something that having an art job really allows for. I wish someone had warned me to look
really goddamn closely at all of the possible downsides of an art career before pursuing one,
because all I heard growing up was either "don't do it, you'll be a starving artist" or "doing what
you love will make you endlessly happy" and I was okay with being poor because I was already poor,
and happiness and art all the time sounded pretty damn good, so I went with it. And again,
I'm not necessarily saying I regret going with it; I'm grateful to be where I am, to be able
to make art my whole life, but I do think I would have done things differently if I'd known exactly
what it was really like, and I want you guys to know before you make the same decisions I did,
if those are decisions that you're considering. So that in mind, I guess what I'm saying is that
above all else, you should evaluate what makes you love art, whether or not an art job would allow
you to do those things to the fullest extent, and decide whether or not out you would still enjoy
that art job if it meant spending a lot of your time not doing those things. And if you would,
make art your job-- get it girl. If you wouldn't, though, pursue a different career path and make
art your passion instead. You can always pursue your artistic ideas as potential jobs later on,
but you'll at least have the time to get them to that point first, like-- my game, manga,
or webcomic could all end up being primary aspects of my job, but I don't have the free
time to develop them to that point. If having a different job allows you more time to develop
yours to that point, you could always pursue them as jobs then instead, and in most cases,
you'll probably reach that point a lot faster. And if you do decide to make art your job, honestly,
I think the only way to survive that while still maintaining your love for art is to make a very,
very clear divide between your work art and your personal art, and fight tooth and nail
to make sure you have at least some time for your personal work. At least that's how it is for me;
I'm able to get through all of my work art because of that one day a month that I can devote to all
of my personal projects, and the brief moments of downtime that I feel with art journaling or
painting flowers or sketching things I love. Those moments, those hours, those days, like--
those rejuvenate me as an artist, they refill my creativity, and they remind me why I love art and
fought so hard to pursue it in the first place, and I'm constantly trying to make more time for
those moments as a result. So long as you have that to bring you joy and love for what you do,
and you separate it from the work that takes the joy and love away, I do believe that you
can make it work in a way that fulfills you. But I did title this video "don't make art your job",
so let me end this off with a followthrough to that clickbait. Don't make art your job if
you can't handle criticism, micromanaging, or rejection, because applying to and working for
both clients and companies will open you up to a lot of both. Don't make art your job if you don't
have the devotion and willpower to stick out years of shitty, inconsistent pay that you can't count
on and can barely live on, not to mention the feeling of failure associated with the idea that
you're not quote-unquote "making it" as an artist yet. Don't make art your job if you don't have the
time and energy to devote to spending your every waking minute working to advance both your craft
and your career, because it will inevitably require you to, at least to some extent,
and if you have a lot of obligations outside of work or a really active social life or something,
you might not be able to commit to the necessary degree. Don't make art your job if you're either
really disorganized or can't handle a really disorganized lifestyle, because freelancing
means handling like 50 tasks at any given moment, and if you're flaky, easily overwhelmed, or prone
to procrastination, it might not be something you're well suited to. Don't make art your job
if having a very fluctuating, chaotic income is something you can't work with financially,
be it because it would stress you out, or because you have dependents or family that rely on you,
or something else entirely. Don't make art your job if you aren't completely sure that you've
prepared for what that means for you, or if you haven't thoroughly researched what it's like. And
don't make art your job if you're not okay with putting your own art on hold to prioritize making
money from art that you make for others. I guess just-- don't make art your job if you're not okay
with making a lot of sacrifices to make it work for you, because like anything that's worth it,
you have to sacrifice a lot to get it. It's just important that you make sure it IS worth it to
you before you invest your life in it like I have. But that's all for me; I can't make the decision
for you, all I can really do is encourage you to make it very very carefully. Again,
there are other types of art careers outside of freelance illustration and content creation
that might work out better for you, but those also often require formal education and again,
also come with their own downsides that I haven't covered here in the slightest. If
you're interested in hearing about those too, let me know, because I'm happy to interview some more
guests and get back to you on that. But for now, I can only comment on the freelancer side of things,
and on that side, I guess I just hope I've made at least someone think more carefully
about whether or not it's right for them. Before I end this off though, I want to introduce you to
a brand new segment of my videos: The Fanart Gallery. I know I've distanced myself from
the community a lot over the past few months due to both harassment and my own fears and
lack of free time, but the last thing I want is for you guys to feel unappreciated as a result,
especially when you've taken the time to make fanart of Celestia. I mean, you guys don't see
what happens behind the scenes, which is that I save every piece of fanart to print out and add
to a big corkboard in my office that I regularly cry over, and I want to do something you DO see,
so I'm going to-- with the fanart gallery. Once a month, or as often as applicable, anyway, I'll
showcase fan art from anyone who's drawn Celestia at the end of my video so that everyone can see
exactly how talented you guys are. I don't want to feature people who don't want to be featured,
so I won't feature all of the pieces that I've seen already, but will instead include
the ones that people have explicitly mentioned being okay with me including. That in mind,
if you want your fanart shown in these segments, please mention me on social media or DM it to me
alongside your consent for it to be included. And this applies to existing fanart too, not just new
stuff-- if you drew Celestia months ago and are hearing this now and want it to be included,
just let me know in the same way, and I'll make sure that it is. There's no time limit. I want to
thank all of you guys as much as I can for the art that you spend your time and effort making for me,
and I want you to feel as appreciated as you are, so look forward to that now and in the
future. Anyway, thank you guys for watching, I hope you enjoyed today's video, and please leave
a like and subscribe if you did. Special thank you as always to channel members Cafe Soleil,
Joseph Solomon, Unknown Code, Abyss Reborn, and Lucian is Apa, as well as patrons Batman,
Kyle Low, blueswanson, thisistotallymyname, Uni Tea, Cora Feere, Jamesha Walker, ShiromeArtiste,
Elenxji, Soul Crystal, and Kim Nguyen for their support, and I'll see you in the next one!