Careers in the commercial arts can lead one into a wide variety of different types of business and different opportunities for artistic expression. Commercial art is usually produced by artists under the direction of others--supervisors, art directors, and so on. Commercial artist might work for a television station, an advertising agency, a design studio, a toy manufacturer, or a newspaper. Commercial artists are expected to have skills, knowledge, and training not unlike those of the fine artist, but the commercial artist earns his or her living in a different way. Some commercial artists work freelance, and others work for studios or advertising agencies, while the agencies do work for several clients or corporations. Still other commercial artists may work within a single corporate structure and design for their company employer (Brommer and Gatto 12).
Another way of looking at the commercial artist is that his or her job is to sell art products that other people need and want to buy, and there are many different kinds of artist under this category, including book illustrators, package designers, art directors, photographers, keyline/paste-up artists, medical illustrators, technical illustrators, fashion designers, cartoonists, furniture and textile designers, children's book illustrators, and so on. Income usually comes in two ways: 1) from working for an hourly wage or a salary on the staff of some type of company, whether a design, advertising, public relations, book or magazine publisher, or similar company; and 2) from working as a freelance artist who agrees to do one job at a time for a company, often under contract. The commercial artist on the staff of an organization is a paid employee, while the freelance artist is self-employed. The freelance artist just spend a good deal of time finding new jobs, keeping accounts for tax records, paying for his or her own medical insurance, and running his or her career li...