5 Lucrative Career Options for Artists

Talent is certainly required for a career in art, but a few have managed to make a more than decent living without exactly being the second coming of Leonardo DaVinci. While anyone with the talent to draw or paint would certainly hope to have a career that brings millions of dollars as well as a prime location inside the Louvre, setting your sights a little more reasonably can still result in a better than average lifestyle.

Video Game Artists
The future of artistry is in video games. Look at how far video games have come in the past 25 years. Now set that creative mind of yours to considering what video games are going to look like 25 years from now. Whether your artistic forte is ultra-realistic or surrealistic, you can find a way to get your artsy jollies while making a more than decent living in the video game industry. Hint: to get a fairly decent idea of where video games are headed, check out a few episodes of "Deep Space Nine" and "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that feature the holodeck as a major plot element. The advanced virtual reality inside those rooms will one day become a reality to some point.

Animator
The 21st century has been a bad one for the art of film. With the exception of animation. Cartoons on both TV and the silver screen have never been better. We are in the Golden Age of Animation. If you have any talent as an artist, get in on this while it lasts. Things to keep an eye out for relative to the death knell of this Golden Age are more sequels from Pixar, more budget cuts from Fox and mistaking underperformance of 3D versions with a downturn in animation's popularity.

Advertising
Okay, let's face it: some advertising actually is art. Very rarely, true, but it does happen. Anybody want to say that Norman Rockwell's work for Coca-Cola doesn't qualify as art? The most lucrative way to get a job as an artist in contemporary America is to get a job in the industry that sells everything to everybody. The Golden Age of Advertising Art has passed, but things are about due for a Silver Age so be prepared.

Technical Illustrator
Illustration is a career in art that virtually assures your work will be seen by more people than have seen all the artwork in the Louvre combined. What is technical illustration? You know all those drawings in how-to books and instruction manuals and textbooks? Anatomy books need drawings of the skeletal system and books on nutrition need illustrations showing how amino acids and proteins are utilized in the metabolic process. Somebody has to create those and the move from printed books to e-books isn't going to impact that necessity at all except to place a premium on those artists with a talent for creating detailed drawings that can be viewed clearly and easily on small screens.

Caricaturist
The person with the creativity to see another human being for what they really are and then commit that sensibility to art can make good money and satisfy a certain psychological need. The great thing about a career as a caricaturist is that you only need an easel, paper and tools to create, making the job of caricaturist perfect for that dying breed of artist who still finds the work itself more rewarding than any renumeration. Set yourself up at the beach, in a park, at a fair or an amusement park and cash in on the natural desire of people to become immortalized in art in less than 30 minutes. When it comes to caricatures, creativity in picturing a person in exaggerated form is more important than strict artistic talent.