Professional Update; Where am I going?

As I near the end of PPP I find I'm asking myself a lot a questions I perhaps should have been addressing throughout the year. A lot of questions about where my work is going, or more importantly, where I want it to go. I feel as though I've spent so much time this year working on live briefs, I've had little time to practice the things that I wanted to practice, or do the sort of work that I wanted to do. This is in ways frustrating, as I wish I'd had more time for personal and self initiated briefs, but what I've learnt from working on live briefs with clients has been invaluable. A lot of where I want my work to go from here wouldn't have happened without the live work I've been completing. 

I still feel really interested in the music industry and illustration. It combines a love of my two fave things, but I'm unsure how much this alone would sustain me. I'm aware a lot of the music briefs I enjoy are for smaller, independent records or artists, that don't typically have thousands of pounds to throw around. What Ben Cox said about doing the perhaps more mundane jobs to fuel my passion projects really stuck with me. With this in mind I think I maybe need to push some of my work into a more commercial context. This includes doing briefs I perhaps wouldn't usually do, or tackling subject matter (architecture, food, etc) that doesn't usually occur in my work at the moment.

Leaving this course, I think I'd also like to really get my online store up and running. It was something I initially wanted to focus a lot of time on this year, but it's fallen to the way-side with my live briefs taking up most of my time. I actually quite like the idea of taking the time after this course to really sort my professional practice out. Though I have refined it a lot this year compared with my second year, I still feel there's a way to go with it. At the moment it feels very 'just leaving university'. I'd like to have a stronger sense of who I am as a practitioner come across through the design elements of my website and blog which still feel a little 'clinical'(?).