As a veteran in the art world my advice to you is to do literally anything else to make money so that you can still enjoy making visual art/games/music/etc.
Unless you’re extremely lucky, art isn’t ever going to pay a good enough wage to justify the grueling amount of effort you have to put into it to stay afloat. The upkeep of being a professional illustrator, musician, game developer, etc will literally destroy your body and perhaps your mind while paying you pennies.
I’m going into hardware engineering which is still a creative field, but one that usually pays well and I’ve been having a lot better time just working on stuff in my free time when I feel it come over me in between school work than I ever did pumping out commissions. Doing illustrations to make ends really destroyed my relationship with anything creative and I just fucking shut down for a long ass time. It also exacerbated my back and joint issues, so I’m now in even more chronic pain than when I started doing this shit over a decade ago.
In a better world none of us would have to be doing anything we don’t want to do to live, but for now I at least am choosing to not try to do the thing I actually enjoy doing so much that I start hating it again and also myself. Woo hoo
