Is there any freelance work available?
The thing is that, if you wanna start off doing PS for a living, you'll need to start off smal, start by doing freelance work on forums, also doing free work as well, than make a website, iDad has, (you need to update it iDad) and this will bring in work as well, also remember to advetise your work, some web hosts have a good advertising tool as well, but you don't have to pay a lot for doing this.
Find a good web host, with a good WYSIWYG editor, and then make a good but basic web site with about 5 pages, and work from there, word and mouth is the best thing to start off with, so when you see somthing that you feel you could do better, copy it make it better and then send it to the owner, they may ask to see other work, but be sure you know what you are doing when trying this as you may end up in court.
All you have to do is think how big you want to be and then try for it, but also keep a normal job as the same time, as things may not work out, there is nothing wrong with going to a local fund raser and asking to do design a dlyer for them, and do it for free, if they like it all you want in return is a note at the bottom with you contact info.
I hope this helps