Art careers are many and varied. Art can be found in a remarkable number of places—on billboards, in magazines, on television, on the World Wide Web, on cereal packages, on postage stamps—and there are many different places where an artist can work. An art education can take you places where you may never have expected to go. If art careers are your ambition, here are some of the places you could end up working:
An advertising agency: Pick up a magazine, and look at the ads. Or, watch some television commercials. Pay attention to the billboards beside the road. Chances are that these forms of advertising contain some element of art, even if it’s an artfully designed logo for a company or a product.
A video game company: On the visual level, video games are almost entirely art, in many cases three-dimensional art created with 3-D modeling programs, such as Maya or 3DS Max. An army of artists is needed to create this art, and making video games could easily be the basis for entire art careers.
Animated films: Animation, whether it be feature length (like many movies from companies like Pixar and DreamWorks) or at shorter lengths, is almost entirely art, and it takes quite a few artists to create a single animated feature. Once again, entire art careers could be spent working on animated films.
Live-action films: Surprisingly, nonanimated films also contain quite a bit of art, especially films that are heavily laden with special effects. Someone has to create the 3-D models of aliens and spaceships that populate science fiction and fantasy films, and there are artist who have made entire art careers out of doing just this.
The government: The United States government uses art in a number of ways. An obvious one is postage stamps, which are miniature works of art that most of us take for granted. Recruiting posters also use art, as do public service ads for government agencies.
Comic books and comic strips: Some of the highest paid art careers in the world involve drawing the comic strips you see in the newspaper. And, dozens of artists are responsible for the comic books you see on the newsstand.
Your Own Business: Perhaps most art careers consist of an artist working in his or her own studio, sometimes with a few assistants. In fact, much of the art done for the government, for comic books, and even for video games is done by freelance artists who are self-employed.
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