What sort of job are you looking to get into?

[ohGr]

Is this entire forum almost all interested in getting into the game development job market or what? When I saw concept art that's what I thought of because that's what I'm going for. What sort of job do you want to get with your talent?

[st_sleek]

I started off wanting to work for george lucas, (inspired by the concept art from the original star wars trilogy) but now that he's gone insane, i don't know what I want to do now.

I have always wanted to be a biologist, running around the world with research teams and going to antarctica, that sort of thing. I always thought those people must have such a great time... although i'll have to get my health in gear before I can get into something like that.

[Wacom Knight]

This should be the "how reality messed up my dreams" thread. Imagine for a moment, every year thousands of artists across the world start out on thier own on the net, or graduate, or whole areas of artistic discipline are wiped out (like Disneys animation department of some 200+ professionals) which releases competitive job applicants that have more talent than you could possibly gain in a year. Then add the internet, then add how all these people can feasibly burn thier own CDs, run animation programs, modeling, digital illustration, all from home, representing themselves, hundreds of thousands competing with low wages offered by companies who KNOW this is happening at an accelerated pace, and take advantage of it.

Darwins theory is the order of the day. Dreams, yes, but they have to evolve as the industry erupts in multifacted ways in just the course of a single month. Personaly, I have to learn soooooo many skills now just to compete to stand in line, good enough to get the honor of a rejection email that says "cool, you were good enough to look at your site, but..."

They always want more. I initially just wanted to be a book SF/F cover artist. Then fell into the RPG realm for 14 years, now that arena is beginning to break from its own limitations, I have turned my time towards 3D, concept, film, design..... you name it.

Just so I don't have to work at the local food mart 3rd shift I'm not being over dramatic, ask anyone who is a freelancer. The internet has been both a blessing and a Bane.

[liquidjack]

Well stated..... and I feel the entry level thing is something of the past. Even getting in as an unpaid intern is a pain in the ying yang. Artist come a dime a dozen and the companies look for the best of the best. I imagine if you want to be a part of it you gotta realize that failure is a very possible outcome. Kudos to those who keep taking that rejection backhand b**** slap and keep coming back for more....... grunts in the trenches of an unforgiving war. Putting demos, websites, resumes and portfolios together, not to mention the investments in the new ultra ultimate superior can do all computers, graphic cards .....and software( Aaargh ME SCURVY BUCKOS!!LOL)

Getting on point, I wanted to be a comic penciller. Now that comics are not as popular as they used to be (putting it nicely)..... I want to do ANYTHING in cartooning, video game creating, and the cool stuff in movies that pack the theatres. I choose to spread myself out rather than focusing on any field (keeps me motivated).

[EarthClimber]

I would love to do video game concept art, such as designing the environment and the creatures that inhabit it. Also character development. Working for WETA workshop and designing creatures wouldn't be bad either

[ducktape]

I'd like to get a job in the development phase of a project, whether it be games, movies, etc. I think my talents lay in set dressing and character design. My big pie-in-the-sky dream job is working for Pixar. Not only do they produce great work, but from everything I've seen about the studio it looks like a wonderful place to work.

[Layil]

well, a loaded question.
i decided, at the tender age of about 10 that i wanted to work for marvel comics... and hence began my art training. my parents were more enlightened than most and let me start art college at 15 instead of going to hightschool, which woulda been a total waste of time since all i wanted to do was draw anyhow. i started out at the academy of art in san francisco california and after two years moved to new york city to the school of visual arts. this seemed a good idea at the time, seeing as the illustration and comics industries were based there, but it ended up being an inferior school to the academy, so i wish i hadnt switched. oh well. good things came of it as well, and in my final year, as i had originally wanted, i had an internship at marvel. my illusions were shattered when i saw the state of affairs in the comics industry and what sweatshop marvel is and i resolved to not work in house ever... so then, after graduating and taking a three year vacation, im once more seeped in art and figuring out what to do with my life.

my interests are varied, and ive decided to take the pay cut and stay freelance because this allows me to do everything im interested in. this is mainly scifi and fantasy illustration, comic art and concept art. I want to get into film and tv more than video games, since i dont play the things and know nothing about them at all. Id also like to get into set and costume design and performance art (is sing as well) which would involve lots of visual things... lastly, im also a writer, (which pays most of my bills) and want to write comic book scripts, allowing me to collaborate with artists and in that my illustration background comes in handy. lastly, i want to exhibit large format paintings in a gallery environment, as this allows me to do basically whatever i want. i think its important to leave room for total creative freedom in an industry where youre always working for nutty art directors.

one long term plan i have, if i decide to stay in barcelona instead of returning stateside, is to open my own gallery space to use both as a studio and outlet for local artists too unconventional or wierd to get into normal posh galleries. concept art would fit into this, in my opinion, as i think were the ones who belong in modern art museums, not the loons who throw paint on canvases willy nilly. but thats a pet peeve of mine..

lasty, theres the untapped potential of the internet, which as Wacom Knight said, is both a blessing and a bane, though i think the latter more than the former. to illustrate my point, ill repost an email from Warren Ellis mailing list: Bad Signal about the subject:

i highly reccomend anything this guys had a hand in, as well as his mailing list, which is always full of useful tidbits...
www.warrenellis.com
www.transmetropolitan.com

***************************************
bad signal
WARREN ELLIS


This may end up as a dry run for a Brainpowered column.
Bear with me.

I did a Brainpowered a few weeks ago about microcasting --
using the net to aim relatively cheaply produced content at
niche audiences underserved or unserved by what we might
call Big Media. These audiences, often existing within the
loose connections of Dr Josh Ellis' "taste tribes" can and do
serve the dissemination of the material through word of
mouth and collective net presence.

The trick, of course, is making that earn money.

I know a lot of people who give away their material free, in
the hope that the people who like it will buy it as a data
object, like a CD. This can work very well, of course -- if
you've got a CD burner, if you have a record deal, if you
have a publisher, whatever. Selling bits -- an mp3, a
PDF, a Flash file, a GIF sequence -- is something different.

There's a crucial hesitation point in using a credit card on
the web. It's not one-click, it's real money, suggests a
significant purchase and can be a real pain in the arse to
set up, even with middlemen like CCBill. This is why Nicholas
Negroponte spent the 90s banging on about micropayments,
and why Scott McCloud took up his banner. Spending small
amounts of money in a quick manner invites a far smaller
hesitation point. PayPal was one step in this direction -- a
quick, simple Internet bank. A pig to set up if you're not in
America, but it's doable, and still probably easier than
becoming a credit-card vendor. eBay did a huge amount
to popularise PayPal. LiveJournal, always very aware of
its massively under-30 demographic, made its paid system
PayPal friendly very quickly.

Magnatune is a record label using PayPal. You can stream
the music on their site. Like it? Buy the album as mp3
downloads with PayPal. This system does beg the obvious --
that people will download it and put it on KaZaA, or zip it up
and Bit Torrent it. But you know what? These are bands and
acts that no-one's ever heard of before. You're not going to
find them on a P2P service any way other than accidentally,
because you're not going to be looking for them. Hell, even
if you decide you like the stuff and aren't going to pay, not
enough people will have them in their P2P folder for you to
lay your hands on them quickly (if at all). It's a calculated
risk on Magnatune's part, and I think it's probably a sound call.

PayPal leads to BitPass, which could be the way of the future.
BitPass lets you buy a token with a one-step PayPal system,
and that token lets you issue micropayment fractions of its
total value. Again, with a quick procedure. Make with the
clicky and you've given Patrick Farley twenty-five cents to
read the latest chapter of his crazed Biblicanime spin on
Revelations, APOCAMON.

Twenty-five cents. In Britain, that's all of thirteen pence right now.

If Patrick Farley had a well-managed internet community behind
him right now, you'd all know his name. Because that, I (currently)
feel, is very much the next step. Because none of these things
will go anywhere without word-of-mouth, or whatever the internet
version is called. Word of clicky, I dunno. This comes back
to Josh's taste tribes. Not fan groups -- simply the net's ability
to allow people with shared aesthetics to cross networks. This
is the use for friend-of-a-friend networks that Tribe.net fell on --
the ability for people to find intersecting tastes in other users
and create an unlimited amount of small message boards to
serve and connect them.

The currency of the net is conversation. It's what the
die-hard bloggers live for -- counting their Trackbacks,
scanning their stats and checking their incoming links
on Technorati. (Perhaps interestingly, and showing this
message is eating its own tail, bloggers like Glenn
"Instapundit" Reynolds live or die on user donations sent
via PayPal. I just wonder if people really use words like
"pundit" in real life without vomiting.) (Yes, diepunyhumans
features all of those things too. But it requires none of
them. Shut up.)

In the commercial arts, conversation is money. If no-one's
talking about it, no-one bought it. And if no-one's talking
about it, no-one's going to buy it. But if people are talking
about it, more people are going to buy it. It's the simplest
thing in the world. The hard part is getting it to happen.

When BitPass first came out, a lot of people were aggressively
negative about it. Some people were blindly positive about it.
I didn't see many people making the only important point --
perfect or not, it WORKS. It works and it can conceivably
help the creative population on the internet. It works and I
can pay for art with it, very easily, in small denominations.
And I want to be able to pay for art because it means people
can make more art. For the first time, the tools, imperfect
as they may be, are there, right there, still being tested,
but really just waiting to be used.

As of right now, there are 5400 people on the Bad Signal.
If all of you went to www.e-sheep.com and paid a lousy
25 cents to read a Patrick Farley comic, he would
instantly become the best-paid serial creator in indie
comics. If half of you went, he's still be doing pretty
well, probably constituting a pro rate for the work he's
doing. For twenty-five cents, microcasting work to
an online audience of less than 3000 people would give
him a shot at a living gig. Expand that out. Even
25 cents for an mp3 multiplied by half the readership
of Bad Signal would mean that that musician is
doing better than 90% of professional musicians -- that
is, earning more than US$600 a month. Seriously.

In fact, to support four artists you like, all you'd have to
do is put aside an entire dollar a month to buy their
art. And tell your friends.

This could be something.

-- W
***********************************

now granted this idea is risky, and time consuming to implement, but its not toally insane either. do any of you have any feedback of ideas on how one could impliment this in the concept art industry? i think this would make for an interesting discussion....

[katana]

Seems I'm of the same mindset. I'm 39, and only just got a degree in Illustration about 2 years ago. It really wasn't supposed to go that way, but at 32 my stint with the Marine Corps ended sooner than I had hoped. So here I was with an amazing amount of focus and nowhere to send it. I knew I didn't want to wind up in Retail my whole life. I would like to buy a house someday, even attract a girl who's not a lunatic. Now, I find myself at a dilema. I also would like to pursue covers with the publishing houses in NYC, but much has changed since the days of Hildebrant. You can no longer just walk in and speak to the AD. I have finally put up a website. My paintings are taking longer than expected, so I have begun figure sculpture as another portfolio to show. I also know that had I learned PS,Illustrator and Quark my chances of getting a graphic design job would be better...Slim, but better. I wonder where my journey will lead me,I wonder if I will ever be able to support myself as a freelancer, and most importantly, i wonder if i will ever be able to pay back my student loans, which appear to be worth nothing....

chris

By the way...I'm a dept. manager in a retail store and have been for the past 4 years...

[jolly]

I would love to illustrate my life away, but I need a couple of things first: more practice and more money.

Well... I decided to take a short program in graphic design, so at the very least I could improve a little on my drawing skills, then (hopefully) find a slightly stable job (even if it was just mounting brochures all day) and perhaps find a freelance job here and there to stay creative. All this with future plans to go back to school and major in illustration. Then I can draw my life away without worry (I can dream).

Right now I have a job as a part time designer for an adult film distributor. It's my first job, and it's just... weird. If you're ever in Canada and want to check out the latest adult video releases, perhaps you'll see my work on the DVD labels (often the ugliest in design you'll ever see. FILTER MADNESS. But it's what they want).

The only thing is, these days the world of multimedia and print are becoming more and more integrated. On a couple of interviews I was asked if I had experience in Flash, which I didn't. I'm sure that would have gotten my foot in the door. These were internships, btw. So now I need to brush up on a new skill there, too.

I'm not saying my situation is completely similar to Wacom Knight's, I mean, that's just insane stuff to have to keep up with, but it's true what he says, "They always want more." And for less, too. I don't mind, as long as I'm being creative, I'll survive somehow.

But eh, yes, the question. I wouldn't mind doing concept art, but I'm open to just about anything really. I love drawing, period, and design can be quite fulfilling, too.

Although the main theme here is concept art, I get a lot out of just lurking about here, even if concept art isn't my ultimate goal.

[neonlights]

Well, I'd like to work in the games industry. Dspite how much I love drawing, I don't think that I will always only want to work on the concept art side of things. I'd like to work in the whole graphics area of games in general and I certainly aspire to become a director for a game or two.

Although I would be pleased to work at most games companies at the moment, I certainly want to get a carreer in Squaresoft one day. Because of this I e-mailed them to see what I'd need.

Actually, I have discovered (as most people have) that a lot of quality games are made in Japan, therefore I am learning basics in Japanese so that I can get a qualification in it of some sort.

[Hedge-o-Matic]

This is a tough question. Like almost everyone here, I have numerous influences on my art, and a varied idea growing up as to what form my art would take. Now that I'm an adult, I find that the art world is a series of rigid cubicles, and almost none of them offer the room to grow as an artist and still make money. The industry side of art has taken over the mindset of the artist, and relegated them to a few armed camps, each believing theirs is the only way possible to make a living. But what I'm discovering is that this fragmentation keeps artists from being the sources of creativity they always imagined, to the point that they often forget that this is what drove them to art in the first place.

So my idea of prospering as a fine artist (portraits, figure art, etc.) clashes with my other desires to work in a dynamic, synergistic field such as game design and concept art. Those focussed on a very narrow spectrum of work, such as monsters and Sci-Fi weaponry, tend to grab the concept work, while those unable to master technique appear to rule the gallery and fine art realm.

So what to do? Is the answer to increase the number of skills on the resume? To learn that Flash, to put together that 3D reel? Isn't that just diluting our efforts further, weakening us as artists, and, ultimately, as competitors in the business world? I think it does. I believe that industry wants nothing more than a low-paid worker who can do the most with the least investment.

And this is the contradiction of working in the commercial art world. Art is a lifetime endeavor, and companies don't exist beyond the next product rollout. The effort of developing our skills so that they reflect the depth of our inspirations is prohibitive. We are required to be mediocre so we don't price ourselves out of the market. So we learn yet another skill, something we can only ask a certain (low) amount for.

I'm uncertain of where the art world is going, and I believe the internet will indeed have an impact we've only begun to feel. But whether it works for us or against us is yet to be seen. With such an environment, how can an artist choose their course?