When your learning to be a designer, you may not be able to work part-time for Nike or Land Rover to finance your studies, but there are hundreds of small mom-and-pop businesses that you can contact with small work proposals like branding, designing logos or just making promotional brochures for their business. These may not be the end goal for a hungry designer’s career, but juniors and seniors from any collage can apply and make some income on the side and gain valuable work experience in their field. And the same goes for photographers and videographers, soon-to-be directors or actors, but what is there for the visual artist, when she wishes to gain some income and experience in the field?

There is the option of applying for a job at someone’s studio as an assistant, but I haven’t really heard of many options to do so, at least not where I come from. So I see – myself included – many people in the visual arts segmenting their skills of making artistic objects and rebranding themselves as designers or photographers or woodworkers, when in reality they aren’t any of those professions. So many of us then wander the job market only to realise that it does take a bit more than being able to kinda use Adobe Illustrator for vectorising your work, to be able to compete with other (actual designers) for logo and branding jobs, and that knowing how to use a DSLR isn’t really the same as being a good and reliable photographer. But what else is there for the studying visual artist or her freshly graduated peers?

So we see creatives working in coffee shops and McDonalds, when their professional knowledge is far from being able to be applied to anything but maybe the aesthetically pleasing compositions of coca powder images on coffees and all around our society we hear the same discomforting message from other professions, saying art should be a hobby first. But I think every one of us is far from being content with such a notion, so the real question is what should anyone starting off their career in the arts consider, when searching for that entry point into art as a career?