You can't make money as an artist!

Throughout my childhood I was told that a person couldn't make a living as an artist. I believed them. This is largely due to the examples that I had of art at the time. My only exposure was what they taught at school which could have been better termed 'arts and crafts.' Commonly what we would do in there would be to follow the teacher's example and make exactly the same thing that they did. It was always something that was tailored to the kid with the least ability to make stuff. It is no wonder that I believed them about not being able to make a living as an artist. Everything that I knew to be art was construction paper, paste, and rubber cement.

My opinion differs now. I firmly believe that you can make a decent living as an artist. Artists do not just do paintings and sculpture, they also design the look of all the products that we use, design the environments that we live in, make our toys, and entertain us. An artist is anyone who uses creative thought to solve a problem. Even engineers could be considered an artist of sorts (though you can usually tell if a product was styled by an engineer because it looks hideous) As I write this I am just getting out of college and I have no doubt that I will soon be pursuing a profitable and rewarding career. I look back to the years that I had decided to be an engineer because 'you can't make money as an artist' and think of how much time I wasted and how much better I might have been if I had pursued my artistic dreams from the beginning instead of trying to find something else that I liked because artists can't make money.

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