I have a question for those that do this (graphic design of any sort) for a living, especially if you've gotten schooling in this field.
Do you feel there is a distinct difference between how you approach your art while in school and how you approach it at work?

In school (this includes your own personal journey for those that are "self-taught") you are encouraged to follow your own path and to indulge in various approaches to a piece. Yet at work (your career) you have to produce (very methodically and efficiently) some one else's ideas. In pursut of your career, and your desire to succeed in your field, your personal work is put aside.
*"There's no room for it"
"There's no time for it"
"There's no requests for it"
"There's no money in it"

My question is "Why do you still do it"??

:)
retrocity

In my opinion, I do personal work just for the fact that I can't get all those ideas out at work. Very rarely do I get to exercise my creativity at work, so there is a NEED to do stuff at home. At school, from what I remember, it was more like pumping out a forced creativity on a daily or weekly basis to the point of it not being creativity anymore and more like just doing it for a grade, which, ironically is like career work now. It took me about 10 years after graduating college to start doing personal work again because I was so burned out on it throughout school. I don't do personal work for any other reason than to get these images out of my head. Even if I don't like the finished product 100% and end up not wanting to redo the piece at any time, I'm happy to at least get it out of my head.

I'm lucky, I'm able to be very creative at work, but much of my personal stuff does not fit within my "works" style. One of the things i like most about Renderosity is i can experiment with different approaches and styles and get some feedback from other artist. This forum, and many of the others on this site offers a great wealth of information whenever I'm looking for an effect and not sure how to pull it off.

I find by working on personal pieces (these are the uncommissioned, unsalaried, and sometimes unseen) that are self-instigated and self-motivated, from inception to completion, that they become a foundation for my "public" work. It is by experimenting with out pressure that I can try fresher approaches to assignments that have unbelievable deadlines.

A local art gallery had a show with some of the "personal" works of fellow designers (whos stuff i'm very familiar with on a work level). I don't often get to see this side of their talent because many of the pieces were not created with the goal of showing them publicly. The one thing that i walked away with was; the need to share our visual communication is so important, especially when there are other designers (even "the competition") who are on the verge of leaving their own personal work behind in pursuit of their career.

I'm lucky as well, because at my work I am my own boss. Ofcourse my clients have specific goals, but a lot of time I get room to push my own ideas and desires around. A lot of time things I do as personal work return, in another form, in 'work' stuff. Especially experimenting with using a lot of programs together to get something realised. Or how to get a distinct look. Or try things with strange perspectives. I am self-taught, I skipped the non-digital part of art, expanding my horizon and want to keep any technical shortcomings in knowledge out of the way when creating, I try to get to know everything possible (or ever needed) about my tools, the software. On the technical side it is 'personal experimenting' , but the result of it is, most of the time, some imaginairy project or brief, that is not only about 'how to' but also something I am glad I created. Yesterday I threw away almost a Gigabyte materials I used to make a 'disco' scene, which took me a lot of evenings and nights (it was meant to have a snapshot look, but still a strong focus on the girl in the middle). I learned a lot from it and I had funing doing so. The fun of personal work, for me, is also that it can be just beautiful, or just shocking or just nice. In work there is a specific message to be told and most of the clients want to appeal to everybody. The word 'mediocre' springs to mind. Actually, I do personal work because I have the urge to create still or moving images all the time. Or images of digital 'carvings'. So when at home, and no work to do, I can't do anything but keep on creating. Sometimes I incorporate personal work in work for clits. A picture somewhere in the back on a wall. At some moment I made a design that incorporated an image for a satellite firm, that needed (unexpected for me, but every kid with a calculator could have warned me) 128 different pictures, that depicted non-existent tv channels. That was an excellent opportunity to put some 50 'personal creations' into the mass market. Not that anyone noticed (though someone mentioned the girl that seemed to suck something on the miniscule far end of the perspective that I thought nobody could ever see, that actually was a rather raunchy picture of a 70's porn movie I nicked from a xxx site. That's why I checked the nudity checkbox, because I was afraid that you are picturing something 'nude' right now), but my rendition of Creepy The Clown (a popular off-topic guy on Renderotica) was out in the open for a public of millions! The answer to the question is: 'Because I have to!'