I'm sure many may be in my situation, but here's me, staying up late and thinking things over for the 1000th time:

I have always loved 2D art, especially concept art & illustration. But currently I work full-time as an engineer, pulling on avg 40-50 hour weeks. The job isn't too stressful exactly, but the annoying thing is, in order to do my job I have to put in a lot of brain power every day. The deep mental dedication required by the work does not allow me to simply pretend to enjoy the job, it requires me to actually "genuinely" enjoy the job (taking "pretending" to a whole new level), which not only further drains me, but is also basically near impossible, since like many of you here my true passion lies in art, and every moment I spend not doing art I feel is wasting my time, life, and soul.

Basically, combined all together, my daily routine right now significantly drains me. The mental drain has overtime grown so much that it's starting to become physical also. I try my best to draw after work and on weekends, and have even tried to take community college classes, but so far it hasn't worked too well, with very slow progress, which is becoming even slower because I have even less free time now due to increasing responsibilities at work, which in turn drains my head further.

So, recently I've started thinking about leaving my day job all together, and simply going to art school. I do not know a single artist in real life, and while the internet does have lots of information it also tends to exaggerate or understate many real life phenomenon, so I have no idea whether an article is written by someone overly-lucky & overly-optimistic, or by someone very unlucky & extremely pessimistic. So, with all this being said, I again put my trust in the heart of CA, and listen intently to what you all have to say



- Are there a lot of people in my situation?
- I have shown my portfolio to people, and visited some good schools, and many of them, including the instructors, tell me I should go for it. Should I take this to heart, or do most people get this kind of feedback?
- For people who really work hard in school, spending 60 or more hours a week drawing, how is the 2D job market right now for concept art / illustration?
- My eventual goal, dream, and definition of "making it" is to work full-time in a studio environment with other artists. Among the people who do succeed as artists, what is the ratio between full-time studio & self freelance? And what is the ratio between 2D & 3D?
- and finally, any suggestions on what I should do? Keep my job and do art in free time, quit job and do art full time, or something else?



I'm sure things like this are posted very often, but being the practical me, I wanted to share this bit with you and hope to hear what everyone thinks Thank you.