After graduating in 2021, with my BA Animation degree in hand I still had a lot of interest in very varying types of projects.

Luckily - because I was freshly graduated - I could literally do any project I wanted to! But what actually happened was that I took any project even vaguely related to art that came my way. This had its own pros and cons - I had work! But... I quickly realised what I liked working on and what I didn't like working on. And very early in my freelance career I did happen to have a few horrible expieriences with clients who were desperate but broke for work and I didn't have a contract in place that would protect me from getting taken advantage of.

You live and you learn the hard way... thank goodness I saw the light and immediately researched how contracts work and saw what other artists usually do in siimilar situations.

So it's now 2022 and I'm working as a Personal Assistant at a local place in my hometown. They're having me do a million different things from admin organisation, menu reformatting, logo design to virtual customer service and stock take for the adjoining restaurant. At this point in time I was a little bit unhappy with what i was doing - I was finding it difficult to break into the animation industry, especially here in South Africa. What I would find out much later is that the big studios like Triggerfish etc. were in the middle of really big layoffs and downscaling since the pandemic happened and to this day the number of employees for these companies haven't quite recovered to where they used to be. So it was a blessing in disguise that I had no idea that that was the state of the industry because I was starting to think about freelancing more seriously.

It was incredibly difficult for me to decide what specific THING I wanted to do because I really loved digital illustration and doing 3D Modelling AND 2D and 3D Animation as well. I didn't really have a favourite between them. In 2021/2022 I did get a few gigs to design logos for family and friends - which I did get paid for but I realised I didn't like designing logos at all - especially if they were text based. I much preffered illustrating characters or something that resembled a creature of some kind.

I then was approached by an old school friend to transform his dad's 2D Logo into a basic 3D Animated one for their marketing and promotional material. Now this was a different way of working with logos that I definitely enjoyed way more.

The next project that came my way was doing an NFT series for Korporate Kudus when NFTs were THE next big thing. I personally don't support NFTs but I was freshly graduated and unemployed at the time so I agreed. One smart thing I'm glad I made very clear up front was that I did not want to be paid in crypto currency (I didn't really understand it and am still not interested in it at all) and that I did not want shares in the project - but rather to be paid upfront for the artworks. This ended up being a very smart move because as far as I could tell, that venture seemed to die out before it had a chance to succeed.

Another project I got was turning a 2D character to a 3D version. I really loved this project but I was still on the fence about what my niche was going to be. So I decided to just do all three for a while and see if any of them particularly was calling out to me.

I eventually got a few digital book cover illustration gigs from a recurring client, specifically for her fantasy books. This definitely helped me narrow down what I wanted to do because I can tecchnically do all the different skills/mediums but just narrow down the industry instead of just choosing a medium. So I made book illustrations and also started creating 3D Book Mockups and Animations as well. During this time I then booked my first official internship as a 3D Artist and later got hired to do 3D Game art which prpelled me into the Gaming Industry.

So then I started slowly specialising in 3D Character Creation for games. I was also able to use my illustration skills for small game jams as well so it all worked out extremely well for my artistic satisfaction.