If you've been making tech money then: leave whatever expensive-ass city you're living in, there are very few full-time artists who can afford to live in the San Francisco Bay any more. Work remotely in your tech job for a year or so, build up several years of runway, because going from "I guess I like to draw" to "I draw good enough that people are willing to pay me for my art, and enough of an audience that I can pay my rent doing this" is gonna take at least five years of it being your full-time job.
If you have a significant other who is also making tech money and is willing to keep doing it, this will be easier.
Get a Patreon or similar up as soon as possible. "Patreon paid for my drink at the artist meetup!" is a milestone worth celebrating as much as "Patreon paid all my bills this month with money to spare!".
If you are interested in this sort of thing, I've observed that indie videogame development offers quite a lot of opportunity to jump between code and art for people with the right skillsets. I also suspect that there's a lot of freelance gigs that would offer the same, since a lot of people seem to think that "Unity Developer" or "Unreal Developer" should be able to handle both graphics and code.
This is actually a good suggestion. As a passionate software developer, I realized that artists that learn coding have an edge in game dev for single player games, where the quality of the code is way less relevant.
As a developer but not artist, I have no such edge.
Not exactly, but I'm working on something that I hope enables independent musicians just a little bit. TBD.
That said, I'm one of those artists who was consumed by tech because I have a lifelong interest in computers. Working on an out myself. Life's short, and it's really happening. My patience for scrums and HR-organized slack #donut meetings is waning. That's not the life I enjoy living, or want to promote to my possible children.
If you're an artist, I recommend doing research into grants. I'm from Canada where our current federal government improved the grant system recently—but there are also third party organizations that offer them as well. They are attainable.
It is work to get them, and you have responsibilities—like tracking valid expenses, some deliverables, and so on. But if it enables you to spend more time on art and less time on building half-baked software projects for cynical gold-rush pursuants (allow me my facetious remarks) then it's worth it. They're not going to pay your entire way, but they will help subsidize expenses for materials, studio time, promotion and marketing, exhibits and concerts, and so on.
Sorta; the Gray Area Foundation [0] in San Francisco is a great organization that hosts and supports artistic projects that incorporate/interact with/comment on technology and society. They run courses on creative coding and host exhibitions and performances throughout the year. Their biggest event each year is the Gray Area Festival [1], which brings together an incredible collection of tech-adjacent creatives, artists and thinkers for a week of great talks, workshops and events. One of the best and most inspiring conferences I've ever been fortunate to attend.
Next time you're at Trader Joe's just ask the cashier about it on the way out, if they aren't an artist they'll certainly know someone in the store who is.
Kidding (sort of) aside, I've known a surprisingly large number of professional artists and all of them had a primary source of income that had a much smaller salary than a software engineer. None of them could subsist entirely from art.
It's an unfortunate reality that artists, unless they're focused on something "practical" like wedding photography, really can barely scrape by as a career, and that nearly always includes having a part time job and a partner with full time income to make it even possible. Even people like professional symphony musicians often need an extra job to get by.
If you're in tech and interested in the arts I would start making art in the evenings. If you have a laid back tech job you should have plenty of time to devote to what you're interested in and will have an income, even at a low paying tech job, that will make you the perpetual envy of the artist friends you make along the way.
tl;dr there is no such thing as a "career" in art. If you're passionate about art, just start making it.
> If you're tech and interested in the arts I would start making art in the evenings. If have a laid back tech job you should have plenty of time to devote to what you're interested in and will have an income, even at a low paying tech job, that will make you the perpetual envy of the artist friends you make along the way.
The laid back tech job is tricky to wrangle in my experience. Like people inevitably say in all the blue-collar threads on HN, tech jobs have a way of sticking in your brain well after the official workday is done. That really dampens my creative energies. It could be that I'm not picking sufficiently laid-back jobs though! I've always wondered, what sort of tech areas would be the most laid back? Enterprise stuff? Government work?
Drawing doesn't really require a lot of 'creative energies' when you're learning. It's mostly mindless grinding of fundamentals, and that can go on for months or years. You should just start doing it to see if you actually like it. There's a billion resources on drawing and painting out there these days, not like it's some esoteric secret.
I make art all the time, during work hours even! I work remote though.
Sorry, maybe I should have clarified: I'm approaching this as an artist that has had time and creative energy sapped by the tech industry, trying to figure out what sort of tech work would let me tip the balance away from tech and back towards art.
Devops at mature company, sure. Devops at a small startup is one of the most stressful jobs you can have, because people use it as a catch-all for security engineer, backend engineer, and 24/7 oncall.
Freelancing could make this possible, you can work in spurts on small projects and do art in between. Also boring jobs like insurance, finance, car companies, and similar corporate america non-tech companies can be pretty chill.
I would recommend (if you're serious) to reduce hours and make art every Friday. Most in tech make enough to continue your life, quite a lot earn less than your 4 day week. Making it in the evening is quite taxing if you're want to create some good.
Generative art is really gaining a lot of recognition in the NFT space. It doesn't have to be on chains like Ethereum either. Fxhash is a generative art marketplace on Tezos. I encourage you to check it out and play with it. The communities exist mostly on Twitter and Discord and are very supportive.
I’m sorry what? Generative art never used to be about making monkeys with random accessories, the artificially designated scarcity of which could be used to boost some cryto bros wallet.
Edit: i see now, fxhash isn’t quite that, but mentioning generative art and blockchain got my hackles up immediately.
I have a hard time seeing generative art as a market for single pieces, but you can get work as a vj
I understand the knee-jerk reaction, but no I don't mean the PFPs. I mean algorithmic design. There is actually a really solid market for it in the NFT space: artblocks.io for example. Don't dismiss it outright.
First off, I'd recommend you explore art on a personal level before you start looking to apply it outwardly. What mediums do you like? What's your style? Where does your inner drive to make art come from?
Art can be incredibly rewarding just doing it for yourself, and from my perspective I'd find it hard to have an artist career without first knowing my own artistic expression.
I'd also be interested in figuring out how I can utilize my tech experience towards a more artistic kind of career. I paint outside of my day job and I wish I could bring the things I love about it, open-ended creativity, curiosity, etc, to my career.
The straightforward path has existed for most of human history:
Step 1: make art
Step 2: don't starve
Big difference between tech careers and art careers is you probably won't find anyone to hire you to be an artist, it's more entrepreneurial than that.
You also can't decide today, with no prior training, that you'd like to be in Broadway musicals, do a workshop or two and then get your first gig. The career change arrow doesn't point both ways even close to equally.
Continuing to be off-topic: if you're considering a change, I'll tell you from my personal experience as a creative type turned dev - devving for a living, stressful as it is, is massively less stressful than doing art.
Trying to be creative on demand is very difficult in the best of scenarios, and trying to be creative on demand when your (shitty) income relies on it is massively more so.
Definitely not the same thing as art, but as far as creative entertainment goes, it would seem like nearly every major tech lifestyle YouTuber whose main focus is "Here's what it's like to work as a SWE/at FAANG" is retiring from tech to become full time YouTubers.
