What jobs include illustration?

Hi Jennifer,

It's good that you're looking at the future and planning how to make a living doing what you're passionate about.

There are many careers and fields that require art and illustrators specifically. The easiest answer is that most entertainment industries require illustrators. Even the music industry often uses illustrations or graphic designs for album covers. Everything from movies, television, and video games need illustrators to draw storyboards to quickly show story or gameplay flow. They need illustrators to design characters, props, vehicles, creatures, and environments.

Comic books and other illustrated books need artists as well. Even some science books need illustrators to visualize concepts that are unclear or cannot be captured in photographs.

Advertising agencies often employ illustrators to come up with ideas or entire ad campaigns.

Even companies like Google employ illustrators to create the Google doodles that they feature on their site for historically significant days.

Let me know if you have specific questions about the video games industry let me know and I'll answer any questions that I can.

Good luck and just know that there are many career opportunities for art and design.

The Chinese language is a graphic language (earliest illustrators wrote in pictograms, etc.). Illustrators work one canvas at a time, speed that up and what do you have?, moving pictograms (like film). Storyboards allow sequential scenes to frame a slide presentation, animated sequence for edutainment, or screenplay for theater, cinema and tv commercials. Take a 35mm digital camera and sketchbooks. Get interships with local theater troupe, ballet company, opera ensemble, fabrication shop (for theatrical sets and props) and photograph their public premiers (red carpet). From film, print key stills. Use montage, panorama or cut-away techniques to illustrate 'artists-eye-view' of raw material. Sell photos to social media, illustrations to art galleries, technical drawings to publishers. Again, the culmination may lead you to document live events (Nascar, NFL, Rodeo, Fashion shows, Lab experiments, beauty pageants, NCCA playoffs, Kentucky Derby, World Cup, Olympics trials, etc. If camera isn't allowed, try "speed-sketching" highlights. A unique perspective can turn a mundane 'image capture' into a spectacular "work of art". Make your hobby a field of graphic study and prosper. Illustration is just slowed-down cinema!