A Career as a Commercial Artist

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 des

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t are used are not part of the artist's repertoire, such as overpowering size, timeliness, or provocation in the headline. Other features are the responsibility of the artist, such as liveliness of design, contrast of elements within the ad, and contrast of the ad with competing ads. The best of the commercial artists in this field work with the copywriters from the inception of the ad through its production. They form an artist-writer team that must design an ad that is successful at selling, and the goal is effective propaganda (Nelson and Ferris 4). The graphic arts field uses methods of printing to produce art works and to print books. Commercial artists in this field prepare artwork for the camera and prepare drawings and other types of artwork for the engraving company. Companies that make and print boxes, cartons, envelopes, wrapping paper, and food wrappers all use artists who are knowledgeable not only in lettering, typography, illustration, and design but are also versed in product protection and display (Nelson and Ferris, 8). The art director is a commercial artist who coordinates the many specialists who will be involved in the production of the final finished copies, meaning the designers, illustrators, layo

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