Career Information for a Degree in Illustration or Drawing

Illustration or Drawing are great majors for creative students with natural artistic talent. In a Drawing and Illustration degree program, you'll learn art history, drawing skills, color theory and design, and you'll study the human body to learn to sketch portraits and make good likenesses.  After completing a degree program in Illustration or Drawing, you'll be ready to work in a wide range of exciting career fields, such as illustration, animation or sketch artistry.

Illustrators create drawings and advertisements for books, magazines textiles, wrapping paper, stationery, greeting cards, calendars and many other media, working with traditional tools as well as state-of-the-art digital equipment. There are opportunities for employment in illustration with publishing and software companies, as well as with motion picture and video companies, computer systems design firms and related industries. 

Animators - Well-trained animators are and will continue to enjoy high demand for their services, especially in the fields of movie special effects, computer gaming, advertising and computer design. Animators are increasingly finding that knowledge of computer animation technologies is necessary for employment in the field, as lower-tech animation is outsourced to other countries. Animators primarily find employment in films, advertising agencies and computer software design companies.

Sketch artists use a variety of media, such as pencils, charcoal and pastels, to create drawings, usually of human subjects. Many sketch artists are employed by court systems for drawing pictures of witnesses and other courtroom images. Other sketch artists use their skills in fashion design to create drawings of proposed designs. According to the BLS, employment should grow at an average rate in coming years.