Hey guys I’m really at the end of my rope. I’m lucky I don’t have to pay rent where I am, but I’m down to eating a can of beans a day. In a month my power and interenet probably will be shut off. I’m not an exceptional artist but even small jobs would help out allot. Where do I look. I know that the easiest way to imediately make income is to find a job in fast-food or retail, but I want to eventually break away from that profession.
See in yourself an exponential growth as an artist. Do it with passion, discipline and focus 
Build teams. All the best macktruck6666.
I don’t think that your portfolio is good enough to work in 3D industry at the moment. Perhaps find something else and meanwhile polish your modelling/texturing/rendering skills. When I decided to become a 3D graphic I worked at a TV station; I used my spare time for my first Blender projects and in just one year I got hired by one of the largest 3D company in my country. SO my advice would be to try something completly different that will hepl you to survive. Invest your free time in developing your 3D skills.
I agree, my portfolio isn’t impressive partly because I’ve had no direction and have had no professional help. I know if someone would mentor me, I could really produce some quality work. I’ve been practicing blender for the past 5 years. I feel that working for a 3d company is trading one ball and chain for another. I probably do need to get a job, but what about freelance jobs on the side.
I dont want to discourage you or be mean but I think you need to be more realistic in your situation. You need a lot of practice to improve your skills. For 5 years of practice your works are unfortunately don’t pass for a decent portfolio. First of all find a subject you can specialize on. Are you a modeler , sculptor , environment artist, character artist , animator , rigger , lighting & rendering specialist etc… Then set a goal for your self ; say to yourself that " In 6 months I will learn this this and this and finish 3 high quality works" (I mean a goal which is achievable and not too hard) .Also surf the net and find a 3D work you think its awesome and either try to imitate the work or try to imitate one of the aspects of the work ( the modeling , animation ,rendering etc.) Then find another and repeat the process.
When you feel you have grasped the subject move on to another.
You say you are in a financial jam, this means that to continue your daily life you NEED some form of regular income , its not a probability. So find a job , part-time or full-time. Then focus all your free time to improving your skills and be on the look out for opportunities. Internships are very important too.
So if all of this means you need to work at burger king and practice at nights then thats what it takes. Practice , practice , practice build a decent portfolio then look for internships at companies. (Advertisement Agencies , Game companies , Software Companies etc…) If an Internship opportunity rises go for it and find a part-time job or a night job to cover the expenses. If you’re lucky enough to find a paid internship all the better then you will learn and get paid at the same time and if you work hard you might get a job offer in the end.
Good luck.
There is a ton of work in advertising, not necessarily 3D, but digital art in general. Google all the Ad agencies near where you live and call them up. Most front desk people will be friendly. Ask to talk to the art director. Even paid internship is a good place to start.
I would stick with fastfood for a while. But at the same time join several of the freelance websites and start bidding. I would lowball your bids to start getting a little money and some experience. After a few jobs and some good ratings, start raising your price.
This does several things for you.
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You start working on other people’s stuff. You gain a lot of experience and grow your skills when you have a customer that is reviewing and asking for changes. You don’t stop when it’s “good enough” like we all do with our personal projects.
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Your portfolio grows with “professional work”.
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You get a little bit of extra cash so you can afford the good beans for dinner.
Place57 has good advice. And as someone who has done a small but reasonable amount of paid work with blender, I can tell you it’s not easy and it’s not necessarily more fun than other jobs.
If you want to support yourself as an “Artist” meaning you sell prints of your work… damn… even if you only sell Pokemon fanart, you’re going to need to step it up.
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make a decent portfolio of the sort of art people actually pay for. I mean business cards, logos, archviz, etc.
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Bid on freelance jobs on Craigslist or elsewhere.
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Repeat step 2 until you’re making a living at it.
Right now your portfolio isn’t great for an amateur let alone a professional. Get your work up to the point where it’s impossible to deny that it’s as good as other professional work, and THEN maybe you can support yourself with art.
Until that point, sorry, but why should anyone pay you?
You guys are definitely right. My portfolio stinks. Remember, I’ve had no training so don’t be angry at me for trying. Right now, I believe my best skill is modelling from concept art. I heard craglists but I still don’t know any other freelance websites. I tried working a little on some business cars and stuff for fictional companies. I sarted a sketchbook thread and would appreciate specific advice on how to make each look more professional.
You dont really need professional training. you just need to focus and set priorities. most (good) art schools/programs want to see a portfolio before admission, this proves to them you are serious and capable of achieving the goals of their program. however, with the rise of the internet and youtube in particular, traditional education is quickly being supplanted by exhaustive tutorial series. it will be a few years yet till it happens. but tuition will continue to rise and applications will continue to fall as more businesses realize that real skill is more important than paper (not knocking paper, i have 2 degrees myself! )
there has been some good advice given in this thread so far. set up a professional portfolio. learn, never stop learning. Theres always something new you can do, some extra mile you can go. and most importantly. Real life takes precedence! get a job to pay the bills. live within your means, (i mean, keep eating a can of beans a day, while you let your bank balance fatten up. if you have a lady friend, good luck. if you dont have one… well… you have the internet, who needs flesh and blood?!
Most important is. dont make excuses for yourself. no training? no problem! your finished works should speak for themselves. hit up the tutorial section, focus on things you dont know how to do yet, also focus on material and rendering tutorials, your model is no good if you cant show it off!
I technically have two degress. One is sign language and one in a BA in Electronics and Computer Tech. I find that a degree means really nothing. Whether a person has a degree or not, it comes down to ambition.
Who needs women when I can make one in Blender 
Unfortunately I don’t find tutorials thorough. For example, I’ve never seen a tutorial that goes from creating concept art to the final render. I would love to get ahold of a list of textbooks from courses from Full Sail. I would teach myself, but I geuss thats why it’s not available.
Hey, macktruck6666!
For learning i recommend you to take a look at Sycra channel on YouTube. There has lots of tutorials and you for sure can learn somethings there!
Take a look
You can also take a look at ConceptArt.Org, on their forums
Here
http://www.conceptart.org/forums/
Another good site to go is CG Cookie, they have some free content and you can learn from there too.
If you want to learn something specific, go to YouTube and search for example something like topology, and so on…
For sure people will help you here on BlenderArtists, so keep posting on your Sketchbook
Wish you best of luck!
^ Sycra Yassin teaches drawing.
Your best bet for tutorials might be getting a CG cookie membership, but naturally you’re still going to need to fund the $18 dollars a month or whatever it is.
here are sites where you can get freelance jobs, more importantly, you can check others’ portfolios to see what level you need to be at to get work:
(craligslist already mentioned)
taskrabbit.com
guru.com
turbosquid.com (3d models and assets for sale)
Basically all of your problems can be solved by using google to find resources, and practicing. The best thing you can do is be uncompromising about the quality of your work. Learn to see the difference between “just OK” and “perfect” and never settle for less than “perfect” - this is the attitude needed to do professional quality work.
Your degrees DO matter. True, maybe not for the art world(your work alone is enough), but they can at least get you into a regular job to start paying the bills. You have two degrees which say “I am a good communicator, can use a computer and I also know a bit about electronics”. Straight away, off the top of my head, I recognise you could be an Electrician or even a plumber. They maybe common roles, but they are still respectable trades. Also, that kind of work is always in demand. Electronics and plumbing are always breaking down and need fixing.
Seriously, my friend, you do not need to starve.
As for your 3D skills, you are on the right track but need to focus. Personally, I would go 100% on modelling and rendering to make your work shine and leave animation for another time. The wonderful thing about modelling is that the software is so affordable now, the process is well documented and you can even rely on local non-computer-related resources such as art muesums, sculpting or life-study classes etc. Also, there is never a shortage of things to model…
I actually like your work(its nice!), but I do notice that its mostly pokemon and games related stuff. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, as its what you are interested in, but try and get something into your portfolio that is a bit more “real”. For example, create a digitial sculpt of your own head, recreate a room in your house or even place some random items on a table and model that “scene”.
Anyway, get a job - no matter how “boring” it may seem - and start to live a more comfortable life. Then in your free time develop your skills.
I wish you the very best and god speed.
The magic words are networking and practice. Get to know people, online and near you. See if you can strike up friendships with local art directors or people working in studios. Decide what you want to do and do it as well as possible. Practice, practice, practice. While it’s true that you may not find stuff that tells you just what to do for all the steps, it’s also true that you can find help for what to do at any given step.
Do the kind of stuff that you’d like to be hired to do. Will people hire you to do Pokemon? Or is that market filled? If you want to do games, make game environments and characters. If you want to do movies, practice high quality modeling and animation or FX. If you want to do advertising, see what you can do with a soda can or bit of currency or emulate the motion graphics you see on TV.
While we are on this topic, I got a question to ask. Most of the time those type of job need to have x amount of experience, how to get around that??
There is two ways for people to get a job with experience requirements - be so good (as can be seen through your portfolio & contacts) as to not need the experience fulfilled or get the experience. Thing is, by the time you are good enough for experience to be waived… you tend to already have the experience. 
The thing with jobs requiring experience isn’t that the employers are trying to be @$$-hats. There is a lot more to graphics work in a business environment than simply being a good artist. Ensuring you have some experience under the gun in a commercial environment saves them money when they don’t have to deal with prima donnas, have artists that can “sacrifice their artistic integrity” for the job, can put you in front of a client and expect your communication skills to be up to scratch, etc. You get that way with experience (and it also provides them with references that know how you work in a commercial environment to contact).
Quoted for agreement.