How To Sketch For Fun and Profit

Here is an article written by Mz Sock from the Philippines. She would like to share her views on How To Sketch For Profit. She has suggested to give comments on this article to help her climb the ladder of success in the literary world.

How to Sketch for Fun or Profit
What does the word Sketching bring to mind? A good way to kill time? Something to do when you're bored, right? All of these things? Yeah, probably. Sketching is a waste of time and energy! It gets you nowhere! That is a huge misconception. People tend to think of artists as homeless men and women, spending day in and day out by the street, making a living off of selling their paintings. Life, basically, sucks. Not in this day and age it doesn't! If you're an artist, someone who's interested in the arts, or just a really bored person doodling every class period away, you'd be glad and relieved to learn that you can not only sketch for fun but also for profit!

Sketching As A Hobby
Let us begin by exploring how you can sketch for fun. Sketching is very enjoyable (duh), whether you are a seasoned painter or someone who merely doodles every now and then in class. Sketching can be very therapeutic as it can act as a distraction. It also helps with something experts call “flow,” which is basically an almost meditative state that a person gets into when he or she is absorbed in doing a particular thing, such as sketching. Besides that, sketching also provides you with a hobby. When you have a hobby, you will feel like you have a more balanced lifestyle, you feel like you have a purpose in life. All of these are very relaxing, which is why sketching is fun.

Sketching For Law Enforcement
We will now discuss another benefit of sketching – profit. Contrary to popular belief, the fine arts do not doom you to a future of selling your paintings by the street. There are many opportunities at careers that require skilled sketchers. Firstly, there is the sketch artist. “Sketch artist?! Don't those only exist on TV?!” I hear you exclaim. No, they're real jobs for real people. If you are an avid fan of crime shows like CSI or Bones, you should definitely give this field further thought. As a sketch artist, you can either be in the police squad or the forensics unit. The police squad would require you to draw sketches of faces as described by victims. The forensics unit would usually require you to sketch with a computer software to reconstruct a crime scene.

Sketching For Entertainment
Next, we will look at another career field that an artist can go into. It is an obvious albeit interesting choice – a cartoonist! What does a cartoonist actually do? Well, have you ever flicked through the pages of a newspaper just to get to the comics section? The job of a cartoonist is to create content for that section. Of course, you don't have to limit yourself to newspapers; you can branch off into different media like comic books, magazines, or you can even do freelance work.
Society has always been appreciative of the fine arts, way back into the days of the Renaissance, the time when naked sculptures and paintings sprung up all over Europe. The problem lies in the way that the fine arts is interpreted, that you will only end up as a painter, a sculptor, or something along those lines. Times have changed, though, and sketching can now be used not only for fun and entertainment but also for legitimate business and career prospects. So, don't throw away all those smiley faces and hearts you drew in Math class; turn them into a portfolio!