I have been deeply involved in drawing for many years. However, I am finding it quite difficult to turn this into a profession for myself. I’ll leave my portfolio below and would love to hear your thoughts.
Is my potential limited to just a hobby? Or have I simply been creating work that falls outside the industry's needs? What do you think?
My Portfolio: https://www.artstation.com/axxaglorious/albums/8442799
You mentioned "the industry", so you would need a portfolio that demonstrated you were able to do something an industry would want to hire you for.
If you want to make art for games (whether promotional/cover art or in-game assets like sprites), you would need to demonstrate an ability to style-match, and showcase some art suitable to be used as a clean asset.
If you want to work for an animation studio, then in addition to style matching, you'd need something that demonstrated your ability to make storyboards, an animation reel, etc. You'd also need to show that you can produce incredibly clean lineart.
If you want to work in comics, you'll need to decide what role you'd be providing (either doing the colours or inks for someone else's pencils, or the entire comic-making process paired with a comics writer), and demonstrate your ability to do that work; include comics pages and isolated lines/colours in your portfolio, including conceptual thumbnails, and demonstrate an understanding of page bleeds and printing colour profiles.
You see the pattern, yeah? Industry art jobs are very specific. You will be the one who needs to figure out what jobs you want to do, and make sure your portfolio demonstrates you can do it.
Right now your portfolio only proves that you can make nice-looking art. That's great, but there are lots of good artists out there. It's not specialised.
Outside of the industry, I think your best shots at making money off art would be commissions (highly over-saturated market, lots of bad client experiences, do not recommend) or as a merchandise/convention artist if you enjoy making fanart and/or designs with mass appeal. If you live in an area or can travel to areas with active anime or video game convention scenes, you could probably make a decent amount of money selling prints, postcards, stickers, charms, etc. featuring your art. Whether you would consider this to be a viable career or a livable wage depends on you, and there is a lot of associated up-front cost.
I noticed you have OCs in your gallery, so if you have any interest in making comics then you could attempt to make your own webtoon or sell digital comics without a writer, but the chances of making money off that are even lower than landing an industry job without a specialised portfolio. Not impossible though, especially if you are good at social media.
TL;DR: you have decent art but there are no generic "artist" jobs, most industry jobs are oversaturated with shrinking positions, so you need to tailor your portfolio to the kinds of jobs you want to get.
