How to Make a Living With Cartooning

Turn your passion for drawing into a cartooning career

Professional cartooning begins with creativity and an active imagination, along with attending drawing classes in high school and college. Taking courses in language arts for grammar and writing skills also can be important for composing captions and story lines for your cartoons. Once you have learned the basics of drawing and composition, there are many ways that you can make a living with cartooning.

Instructions

1. Build a fan base by regularly posting cartoons that you design on your own website or blog. Use your site to sell your cartoons as downloadable digital images, while also networking and getting your talent noticed. Each cartoon can be sold over and over again, creating a passive ongoing income.

2. Gather copies of your best cartoons and prepare a professional portfolio. Apply for freelance cartoonist positions with local magazines, advertising agencies, greeting card companies and newspapers. Take along your portfolio for the interviews to showcase your experience and skills as a cartoonist.

3. Design T-shirts, mugs, mouse pads and other merchandise featuring your own logo and cartoons. Sell your custom products on a merchant website or an online auction. Set up a bricks-and-mortar store in your local area and couple that income with your virtual business to increase your profits.

4. Start out working as an assistant animator in motion picture, video game or television industries. Assistants work under close supervision and direction of the chief animator and fill in drawings of lesser importance. Advancement opportunities with higher pay become available for competent and dedicated assistants.

5. Become a web cartoonist. Websites hire or contract with cartoonists to draw webtoons, graphics and editorial cartoons for e-book or web placement. Another option is to create your own popular web comic that may be picked up for publishing in traditional newspapers, or paper-print your web comic and sell it in book collections.

References

• What Newspaper Cartoonists Can Learn from Web Comics
• Cartoonist and Animator Job Description
• National Cartoonists Society
• Artists and Related Workers