Graphic Design Is My Passion

The art of drawing on yourself is in. I’ve seen people paint masterpieces just on their eyelids. I want in. What cake/water activated eyeliners do you like? So many of them seem to be the same private label stuff. The MAC Paintstick Palette is tempting, but it’s $70. Maybe I just have to give into the private label “brands?”

Hi. Silly title and probably silly question, but I'm looking for genuine advice.

My goal in life is to be an Illustrator. I love painting and drawing, but I also love visual communication; I am enamored with the idea of being able to tell a story through a single picture. I know not every artist is a 'I was born to create!' type, but when it comes to Illustration that's absolutely how I feel; like I was born to illustrate. It combines the two things I love doing the most into one job.

My parents and teachers in high school understandably (but unfortunately) conflated Illustration and Graphic Design. I ended up taking a course in Graphic Design when I was 17. I hated it. I can't remember exactly what turned me off it but I think it was mostly the fact that I felt like I'd been lied to. I'm not the most meticulous or detail-oriented person, and that really clashed with the clean minimalism my teacher's expected of me. All I wanted to do was paint, but instead I was arranging pre-made pictures into InDesign and then staring at fonts for hours. I wanted to be the one making those pictures, not the one arranging them!

After that course I did a year of Fine Arts, because as it turns out, Illustration is too niche of a discipline to be taught in semi-regional Australia (ie, there are no Illustration courses that I can feasibly attend). If I want a job as an Illustrator, all of my qualifications will have to come from self-study and portfolio work, but the problem is that right now I work in a severely understaffed retail job 5-6 days a week. I have barely any time for actually making art out of the things I learn online and I am terrified of that lack of productivity trapping me in retail forever. I see job listings for Graphic Designers all the time, but never for Illustrators. I can't help but be convinced that one is the 'smarter' choice, even thought it's not what my heart wants to do.

Maybe studying Graphic Design won't be as bad now that I'm an adult and I know what I'm getting into. I'm super interested in learning the skills for UI/UX design as a potential pathway into video games, and from what I understand a lot of 'Graphic Design' jobs these days expect you to be a jack of all trades anyway. Maybe I can start in Graphics and then move on to specialize in what I actually want to do. I'm already used to doing work I'm good at but don't love- Graphic Design can't be worse than scanning barcodes, right?

I could be planning to jump from one pool