Freelance Illustrator
The first job I looked up was a general illustrator as I am interested in drawing and I view my artistic talent as one of my skills. To become an illustrator you don't need any specific qualifications, although a degree in illustration would be useful. The only thing truly required is artistic talent but skills such as attention to detail, creativity, time management, a variety of styles, the ability to work to a brief and communication skills with the client are essential, especially if the client want's you to go in a certain area. In this job you may be asked to illustrate many things, from medical diagrams to business cards and you can be based at home or a studio depending if your freelance (at home) or permanently employed (in a studio or at home depending on the size of the job). If you are freelance like most illustrators you may want to hire an agent to find and negotiate with clients for you, unfortunately this costs quite a lot as they can take up to 40% of the payment so they're not the most sensible of idea's. For an illustrator just starting out salaries can range from £14,000 to £19,000 a year but when experienced you could earn up to £20,000 or even £30,000. Earnings during the first years may be patchy and many illustrators take part-time jobs to survive, earnings may also vary depending on the state of the market so it isn't the most stable of jobs, you also might be stuck working long and uncomfortable hours in order to meet a deadline.
To get this job I would preferably go onto the BA (Hons) Illustration coerce to get more experience and develop my skills, I can get onto this course with the qualifications from the course I'm on now. The skills I feel I'd need to improve on for this course are my semi-realism style, my backgrounds skills, my animal/monster drawing skills and my vector imaging skills as 99.9% of my artwork is bitmap based. To help me improve I have started to study animal anatomy, buildings and landscapes, I hope through practice to keep improving until I reach my desired level.
Character designer
The second job I looked into was character design, it's quite similar to illustration in the fact you don't need qualifications, just artistic talent but there is another main skill you need for this job, imagination and creativity. Skills like the ability to follow a brief, attention to detail, good idea development are important as well at communication with the client, which is especially crucial. Again you could work from a studio or home for this kind of job although input from co-workers would be useful, as a character designer you could be asked to design many different characters, for example game villains or just background characters. An average salary for character design for a year is £20,000 but this really depends on who's employing you, your skill level and the state of the market at the time, quite like illustration. As a character designer you'll have to convert concept art into designs and model sheets (Also called turn-arounds) for the animators to use.
To get this job I would preferably go onto the BA (Hons) Illustration course to get more experience and develop my skills, I can get onto this course with the qualifications from the course I'm on now. To get this job I'd have to improve my anatomy skills, especially with different views of people and my art of non-humans like animals and magical creatures.
Graphic Novelist
The last job I looked into was a graphic novelist, yet again no strict qualification is needed yet artistic skill plays a big part in this job as well. Useful skills for this job include imagination and creativity, patience, perseverance, time management and most importantly drive to finish what you started as this job can really be hard work. There are a couple of ways to get your novel published; either by entering a competition, becoming an assistant and working your way up, pitching a mock up of your story to a publisher, or on the other hand you could publish it yourself, but this is expensive. Or you could publish a web-comic and wait to be approached but this isn't the best idea as it isn't really pro-active and it's really hard to get popular on the internet. As for income it really depends on what kind of publisher but mostly you get a fixed sum per page, which is very dependant on your skill levels.
To get this job I would preferably go onto the BA (Hons) Illustration coerce to get more experience and develop my skills, I can get onto this course with the qualifications from the course I'm on now. I'd also have to improve my background skills and poses. This job appeals to me the least as drawing the same thing again and again would get very boring for me.
