Illustrator/Animator
You invent the characters people remember, and you decide what happens to them. That invention was always the real job, and it stays yours.
Related: Filmmaker, Motion Designer, Content Creator
The day in the life
Bram animation · the plan
- 1.Bram, grumpy lighthouse keeper
- 2.A few seconds of him moving, on repeat
- 3.One small thing he does that is unmistakably him
- 4.What he does: ? (you decide this first)
who he is, before you make a single picture
A few seconds only holds one small thing Bram does. What does he do that makes anyone go, yeah, that's him?
Try a day as a illustrator/animator
A short, playful taste of the real work.
Two very different jobs here. Drawing still pictures barely grows and is the part machines are taking over fastest, while making drawings move for films and games, called animation, is safer and pays more.
Nobody stops you from drawing for a living, though most people who do it work for themselves rather than for a company. Companies that make animation do hire beginners.
BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook: Fine Artists incl. Illustrators (SOC 27-1013), Special Effects Artists & Animators (27-1014), May 2024; Glassdoor / Research.com bands.
What you’d actually do
The picture is drawing or animating your own art all day. The reality is working to someone else’s brief: client revisions, studio notes, deadlines, plus the freelance hustle of finding work and invoicing.
The tools can now generate the images and fill in the drawings between the key ones. So the part that stays yours is authorship: inventing characters, telling stories, and deciding how it all looks.
- Production (drawing/rendering/animating)55%
- Concept & design (character, story, look)10%
- Revisions & feedback15%
- Direction & coordination5%
- Business & client15%
Over half the day is drawing and animating, to somebody else’s idea.
Rough split, based on how illustrators and animators describe the work. Varies by freelance vs. studio.
There’s more than one way to draw for a living.
- Character designinventing what a person or creature looks like, so everyone else can draw it the same way.
- 2D animationdrawing picture after picture so it looks like it’s moving.
- Concept artpainting the world of a game or film before it’s ever built.
- Motion graphicsanimating text, logos, and shapes instead of characters.
A typical early-career day
- 9:30Develop the idea
Work out the story and the character: who they are, what happens. The authorship part, and the part that’s really yours.
- 11:00Reference & look
Gather references and lock the visual style, what the world feels like before you generate anything.
- 1:00Generate the art
Produce the panels, backgrounds, or characters. Fast, but it takes direction to get something that’s actually yours.
- 3:00Fix consistency
Make the character look like the same character across every panel, and match the look. This is the fiddly real work.
- 5:00Notes & revisions
Client or studio sends changes; you revise. And if you freelance, you’re also chasing the next gig.
A rough day for the illustration side. Animation in a studio looks different, more pipeline and technical work, but the authorship-vs-rendering split is the same story.
The outlook
Where it’s going
These two paths are splitting. Illustration is flat and is the visual field most directly hit by AI: tools now generate commercial illustration straight from a prompt. Animation is steadier (film, games, and VR/AR), where those same tools speed up the busywork but haven’t replaced the creative direction, and across both, the rendering is being automated while the authorship (characters, story, art direction) is what holds its value.
Right now
Illustration is under real pressure right now: flat hiring, mostly freelance, and the commercial work (stock, covers, first-pass concepts) is exactly what now gets generated. Animation is healthier with steady studio demand, but both reward the same thing: a distinctive voice and real character-and-story judgment, not just clean rendering, which is the slice worth building.
Sources: BLS OOH (SOC 27-1013, ~0% growth; 27-1014, +2% growth; May 2024); Glassdoor; Research.com (freelance dominance, AI workflow shifts, VR/AR premium). Dated June 2026.
Would you actually like it?
Worth a look if you can invent characters and stories people care about, the part no tool can do for you.
In practice, people realize it’s their thing when…
- they can invent a character with a real personality and a story worth following
- they think about the whole look and mood and why each choice is right, not only about drawing it well
- they are okay drawing what somebody asked for, and changing it again and again until that person is happy, not only making their own art
- they would build a style people can spot as theirs from across the room
…and it probably isn’t their thing when
- they pictured drawing whatever they want all day, and most paid work is drawing exactly what somebody else asked for
- their plan was to live on the everyday paid drawing jobs, like book covers and rough drawings of somebody else’s idea, because that is the work AI now makes on its own
- they want steady pay every month for drawing: that side is barely growing, and almost nobody gets hired to stay, so the money stops between one piece of work and the next
Animate a 15-Second Short
Plan a 15 to 30 second cartoon by drawing one rough picture for each thing that happens, have AI make them move, then throw away every second that is not good enough. Deciding what stays and what goes is the real skill here, and it is the part no tool hands you (if you would rather work in still pictures, the comic strip project tests the same thing).
Or try one of these