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40 Days of Art: Professional vs Amateur
Apr. 15th, 2011 01:20 pmI am going to pass on to you a nugget of wisdom I received from my mother when I was getting burnt out towards the end of animation school. She had been in a similar situation in theatre school, and had been told by one of her teachers:
I am lucky enough to be in a place, now, where I do things that I both enjoy and get paid for (most of the time), but it was not always thus – I can remember times where I drew the line so completely between amateur and professional drawing that I could have been drawing eight hours a day for weeks on end and, without thinking, tell people that 'I haven't drawn in ages.' I hadn't drawn anything for myself in ages, and all the pages and pages of drawings I'd done at work in that time didn't even register. I don't know if that's professionalism or just mental illness, but there you have it.
When you're planning to make the jump from amateur to professional, it's important to remember why you got into the field in the first place. Try to hold on to what you love about what you do, even if it means doing the same thing outside of work – especially if it means you do it outside of work. Fan art kept my love of drawing alive: If all I drew was what was required of me by the productions I was on, I would have come to hate my job very quickly, and never improved. I kept learning because I wanted my fan art to look better, so my amateur art took me much further than my professional art did. If you can be an amateur and a professional at the same time, you could have a very personally rewarding career ahead of you.
An amateur does it because they love to do it; a professional does it even when they don't want to.The dividing line between amateur and professional is not skill level – there are blissfully talented amateurs out there that can draw/act/sculpt/yoyo/dance/sew circles around some professionals – but professionals do it for a living. It is their profession. If you want to pursue art, or anything else, as a career, you need to be able to make yourself do something even when it is the last thing you'd want to be doing. For some reason it's especially hard to do this when it's something you used to do purely for the love of it, rather than something you've never liked doing, but it needs to be done, otherwise you won't have a profession for very long.
I am lucky enough to be in a place, now, where I do things that I both enjoy and get paid for (most of the time), but it was not always thus – I can remember times where I drew the line so completely between amateur and professional drawing that I could have been drawing eight hours a day for weeks on end and, without thinking, tell people that 'I haven't drawn in ages.' I hadn't drawn anything for myself in ages, and all the pages and pages of drawings I'd done at work in that time didn't even register. I don't know if that's professionalism or just mental illness, but there you have it.
When you're planning to make the jump from amateur to professional, it's important to remember why you got into the field in the first place. Try to hold on to what you love about what you do, even if it means doing the same thing outside of work – especially if it means you do it outside of work. Fan art kept my love of drawing alive: If all I drew was what was required of me by the productions I was on, I would have come to hate my job very quickly, and never improved. I kept learning because I wanted my fan art to look better, so my amateur art took me much further than my professional art did. If you can be an amateur and a professional at the same time, you could have a very personally rewarding career ahead of you.
