Hey there! I'm an office monkey doing IT stuff. I've mercenary'd my way across multiple teams for the last decade (level 1 support to basically DevOps for payment systems) with no formal training or certification at a fairly large company. It's nice that my bosses all seem to appreciate that I'm flexible, but my work kinda swells and relaxes every couple months, and sometimes it feels unstable since I've never actually put any of this knowledge into an accepted certification. I look into certifications but nothing jumps out; recently I gave AWS a shot in a self-guided course and realized I was pretty bored by it. Something that popped into my mind as I noticed that I don't really have a "portfolio" is that I have tons of car work, audio editing, off-the-cuff writing about games, etc things that have to do with my hobbies in gaming, cars, music, shitposting on the internet, etc that I'm happy to make without feeling pressured. I feel like if someone asked me to pick up something like this for pay and give me a deadline - a program to edit, a car to work on, an image or audio to manipulate, something analyzing a piece of art - I'd happily do it without even thinking about it, and they're the kinds of things I could do for hours losing track of time.

Being a breadwinner right now with a kid I don't have the risk factor to jump careers right now, but if I lost my job I feel like I'd want to give some different industry a shot. Problem is I just don't get how people... weasel into these things? Is that how this happens? Or do they just eat a ton of time/money making these laterals? Where do they get the experience, where do people find the connections? I'm curious - has anyone ever turned a hobby into a career? Did it work out?

I drew a LOT in my childhood and youth, but later forgot about it. My skills and my patience is pretty much gone. I look at my old drawing and wonder, did I really make that? Damn. But I'm slowly trying to get back in the game.

I know how to get the outlines in place first, but I'm unsure how to go about the shades of grey. Some instruction online suggest that you concentrate at one area at the time. Others seems more like you're supposed to start out with the brightest shadows and slowly move towards softer leads.

Does any of you have some kind of structure here?

Send me a list of things to listen to for a day. Probably best if it's 4-8 hours, but if you want to recommend less (like an album or two) I'll listen and then use the "radio" feature to stream similar music afterwards.

Alternatively or additionally, feel free to get out of your comfort zone and join in on the listening.

Context:

I have a lot of time to listen to music while working. Recently I've been getting bored with my go-to catalog. About 5 years ago I posted out like this on a different platform and had a pretty good experience.

This doesn't need to be specific/catered to me, since that's part of the experience. But if it helps, I tend to listen to pop, electronic, alt rock, R&B, and funk. I also enjoy jazz and 40's music. Here's my last.fm if you want more specifics, though the all-time stats are skewed towards my heavy listening a decade ago.

Edit:

Feel free to post links to whatever you use to listen or no links at all. I don't mind doing some leg work to get it playing on my streaming service.