11 Jan 2018, 18:18

Good day everyone! I hope you are all doing well! I am currently a graphic artist/designer and I have 4 years of experience in the field. I have this strong desire to follow the dreams of my youth and make cartoons. I currently do animations for projects at work, mostly GIFs that are used for emails in Mailchimp and for some of our products. On a side note I successfully pitched an idea in 2016 to animate some of the vocabulary cards we sell. We incorporated QR codes into the printed product that can be scanned and then children can see the vocabulary card animated.
Every year Nickelodeon looks for talent through their Nick Artist Program. I have applied to this 2 years in a row and I will continue to apply for it until I am employed as an animator there. My question is: how do I go about applying for jobs in animation? I plan to continue to apply for the Nick Artist Program, but I am comfortable and confident enough to apply for jobs in the industry. I definitely understand that I won't be working at the top level out of the gate, but I want to get my foot in the door. I am looking for suggestions to do this. What is the best approach? Should I just apply to jobs posted or should I also try to send my portfolio to people?
I am attaching some of my work. As a background to all of this I have completed an issue of a comic book I wrote and illustrated called Legend of Three and I am currently getting paid to draw another authors script into a comic book. I have also worked on a few video games, one of which is a super simple pixel endless runner and the other was successfully green-lit on Steam but the project was canceled.
Let me know how I can better my work or how I can go about trying to break into animation.

A lot of the work I do is for events and galleries in Lubbock, TX. Many times Alamo Drafthose will have events where local artists can set up at a table in the lobby and sell their art. The art has to match the movie coming out like The Last Jedi. The next one is Black Panther.

This Gravity Falls piece I did for a First Friday Art Trail with the theme of "gods and monsters." I figured Bill Cipher was both so that's why I chose this piece.

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This Daredevil piece was my very first showing on the First Friday Art Trail.

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This is my character Jack from Legend of Three

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This piece I did because the author of Meteor's N Milk was seeking local artists to feature in the first issue of his book. The Jack character in the front in my own creation and the other 2 are his main characters.

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I did this piece for a Christmas gallery.

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I did this piece to feature at the opening weekend of Star Wars The Last Jedi at Alamo Drafthouse.

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Thanks in advance for any advice and comments. I am looking for critiques and advice.
Thanks,
Chris Nazario