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!'