How To Build A Winning Art Portfolio

hey there forge costanzas hi how you doing introductions it's been said many times that art is a field where you don't really need a degree you don't need certification all you need is a strong portfolio proof that you can do the work is pretty self-evident and sure i think there's things like being an effective communicator and having decent people skills that are also needed but a strong portfolio makes it so someone that's looking for work to be done can tell that you can do it in this video i want to bust the top three myths about building a portfolio and equip you with some advice to guide you as you build your own i also thought it'd be fun and insightful for me to critique and update my own portfolio now to have a portfolio you need a website and that's why today's video is brought to you by me who pays for squarespace oh shoot that would have been a good idea this is kind of a video years in the making but that isn't really something that deserves any praise like many art related projects i started making it 15 months later and since i recorded the initial part of this video i've made quite a bit of work and dare i say it's improved so it'll be fun to say goodbye to a lot of the stuff that's been in there for the better part of a few years and introduce some of the stronger work as well so let's talk about you and your work with the top three portfolio building myths the first being if you build it they will come having a good portfolio is really helpful but i think too many artists set up shop they finish their portfolio and then they kind of kick back and wait for the jobs to start rolling in that might be a little bit of an exaggeration but that would be kind of like letting a stack of business cards sit in a drawer for a year and then wonder why no one's contacting you here's the thing the web has become pretty centralized toward social platforms in the last decade and so less and less people are just going to happen across your website but barring that still i think that a portfolio pairs well with activity art posted recently active work on a project it helps clients see that you are currently working whether it's for client work or your own stuff instead of them wondering wait when was this thing last updated activity is also simply the way that new eyes will get on your work whether it be from social media or elsewhere for me weekly videos and all the places that i share my art do a lot to help new people learn about what i do to bust this myth further it helps not just to wait for the work to come to you but for you to go to it now that your portfolio is made you'll be able to show very visually oriented clients why yes i can do something like what you're asking the second myth is that i need to put it all in there less is really more when it comes to portfolios and you want to do some filtering when it comes to quality but you also don't want to throw every kind of work you've ever done in and expect the client to parse out what you're capable of now some will say puritanical things like if you want to be a character designer only put character design work in and i think there's a good nugget in that but i'd say more generally put the work in that you want to be hired for if you like me probably wouldn't get too excited to work on a gritty military animation project and it's a little outside of your wheelhouse you don't have to include examples of that just because you've seen other legit artists do so when it comes to the kind of work i found that at least helps to break the work into categories that way you're organized and it makes a little more sense to someone looking only to hire you for animation let's say hey look here's the section of their animation thank goodness the third myth is that fan art won't get you hired now while there is some nuance to this and a degree of professionality where the venn diagram of fan art and portfolio start to differ this myth simply isn't true lately as so much ip continues to get rebooted and spun off long time fans end up getting hired because of their fan art plus if your skill is in rendering really dynamic photo realistic paintings and you've done let's say a really nice painting of hey arnold that shows really clearly what value you provide and especially to people that recognize arnold this reminds me to say that case studies and projects that work as a proof of concept are just as valuable in showcasing what you're capable of beyond an image of the finished project so let's take a step back to may 2020 and look at the portfolio that i had then some of the things that i said during this recording align with my goals for my work then and some of those things have changed i think what's important about that is that a portfolio can be a fluid thing it's there to work for you and nothing there is set in stone okay so taking a look at what i have right now the last time that i updated this was about august or september of last year so especially through all the stuff that i've made through biko's backpack i have a lot of new work i have a lot of sort of level ups artistically since then they kind of render a lot of these pieces obsolete there's also a few new things that i want to make that this portfolio is lacking right now from the perspective of what would look good from a hiring perspective all right so a few things in here first of all we'll get to the individual pieces in a minute but the current layout is a section of character design and then a section of just more general illustration work and i'd like to add a section for animation work it's a little bit of a balance that you want to strike where you don't want to overwhelm a potential client with too much work so we'll sort things out so it's only kind of the cream of the crop that i keep in the portfolio all right first off here is our beggar bard character and her her cat i think good one it's a maybe to keep it's a it's very over rendered and a lot of muddiness especially in the legs but then like a lack of detail in certain spots so i want to do a few other things as far as human design this is a very old cast of characters called dire knots i think i'll keep this though i might even develop some turnarounds or something this is the kind of thing the kind of design that would work well for like a tv animation or rigged puppet animation the little myra character kind of predates parcel very similar i would have to kind of figure her cloak out a little bit better too this wanderlumen is an outdated design i had a crisis with him over the years i'll replace that with the card illustration with the glow pups and the vest this bard is actually in here twice and i guess i just liked the sort of stark stage lighting that he has going on but there's a lot that's kind of whack here so it's coming out this is the deputy time keeper from parcel i do like this it's a maybe there's a few things that i'd probably clean up or even kind of re-draft this is a pangolin from shackleton it's a it's a maybe i guess mega man and protoman redesign also maybe i'm gonna keep this time timekeeper turn around and maybe throw the chibi version of him in there as well this koala is like a scrap maybe it's just so old it's really rough rendering it's just like one multiply layer of purple this was a twitch mascot commission and i might keep it because it's so simple uh it's just sort of like a a little bit of a quicker turnaround design for for people looking for this kind of thing john a dad um this is like a maybe keep the render is kind of dull but it works i like the sort of feeling of the character and the the piece this is an old jaclyn and probably one of my favorite pieces currently is the jack art that i have here um so that's going to go in this place and i've got some other versions of her possibly a character sheet and some animation of her for the animation section here's that bard again it's from a banner that didn't really work and it's a maybe to keep this individually i would like to re-illustrate him soon though this is an old koji from that same banner i have a new one so this is a toss this is an old old biko before he was biko there's a really improved version to swap in so this is also a toss all right this is the mascot that i made for a photoshop tool uh so that people could post to dribble uh in their very restrictive dimensions i i try not to cause like a lot of drama here unless it's peppa pig but dribble was completely complicit in this guy who harassed me through their platform for months about how i was cyber hacking him um because i happened to name a character something that the same as his company name that he had apparently spent months thinking up um man honestly like the ego on that guy was insane and dribble did absolutely nothing to stop this big executive dude from harassing a penniless at the time character designer so this is a toss no one uses dribble and thanks for nothing sorry having a little ptsd there this is a lobster knight that i drew on twitch i'd have to fix the line art color if i wanted to keep it it's a maybe i don't think there's anything special about it but people seem to like it when i made it i don't know i'm still thinking about how fruitless it is to try and get clients on dribble this is a piece that i called clem's confectionary and i actually redid the clem the the hummingbird design on the playing the light box last year so this is a swap out i still like the background and i definitely do need to do more props and environment work along these lines this is frog glove frog girl it's a very old sort of like skill level fluke for the time where i somehow made something better than i generally could at the time so now i've got this sort of bucktooth redhead girl character three times over in this portfolio so i think it's time to put fgfg to rest now we're in the illustration section um this is the super nice bros print and the fun thing about this was i did a bunch of planning ahead of time of what characters i would use so that i could utilize a limited palette so it's actually only like five or six colors and then a dark and light variant on those colors in this piece so that the illustration doesn't get so muddy despite all of the different characters in here and i was also so sure that gino was going to get in the game that uh he was actually who ness was talking to originally before the piranha plant so i think i'll keep this in here for now this is the donkey kong country redesign pass that i did uh there's some really muddy rendering here mainly because it was rushed um but also people were so incredibly mean to be about this attempt at a redesign so i don't know why i should keep it the redesigns are fun but people don't really ever understand that i'm not trying to replace their precious existing designs they see what i'm doing is like an attack and get really incredibly nasty here's a few pieces from a series that i did integrating invisible creatures into photos of folks that i know that bottom left creature is actually called a glow pup before the wonderlumen companions so this is a few that i would probably redo but ultimately this series meant a lot to me so i think i'll keep it in here this is the cover and a page to parcel it's good to keep i want to do more comics i just need like a ninth day of the week full of energy to draw so i can get all the things i'm trying to done uh here's here's tristan uh so i i never talked about it publicly but tristan actually passed a few months ago so his poor little galaxy eyed man is is uh put to rest i miss him i'm gonna keep this i still want to do like a little portrait of him to remember him a very good friend i have a few more animal crossing things that i could add in here these are okay maybe i'll sort of populate the same image with nine instead of just two sets of two yeah sorry for any bummers in that walkthrough i'm not a very big fan of the past in general and i'm always looking to the future all right cool so step one i'm going to take out the pieces that i said i would step two i'm going to add in some new designs including uh an animation section it's not much but it at least shows that you're versatile and i've kind of found a place as a generalist that kind of gets me the most work step three make a few new things especially for this portfolio also i need more world building around characters like uh props environments buildings and stuff like that and i need to show some expressions and turnarounds a little bit more kind of show my work a little bit more and i might split certain characters let's say into two images in a row one more gestural and expressions and one more spreadsheet-ish construction also i may not get to it this time but i'd really like to have some more storyboarding work uh or at least more sequential art stuff because i feel like i have it in me to do but every time there's a position for that i can't quite show it that's like a constant thing with job openings is that i never have work i'm happy with to show so hopefully this whole process will help that so time to get to work this might take a while and i'll see you in a few days or weeks or something whenever i actually complete this aspect of the project [Music] so like i mentioned a lot of the things that i talked about at that time were oriented toward the kind of work that i wanted to get i wanted to add an animation section i wanted to continue including animal crossing commission examples and while i wouldn't necessarily turn down commission work nowadays at the right price and if i have scheduling availability it's not what i'm actively seeking out so now as i have time to primarily work online with a select few clients and with my own projects i can kind of pick and choose who i work with a lot more two things that i said then i do still need to include one is more tertiary visual development work props and environments that would be helpful i just haven't been able to practically focus on that kind of work the second is a section for animation work and i do have an idea for that since i am currently working on the pilot for storm fellers where i am doing all of the art and animation it functions really well as a case study the same with the game projects that i'm working on that include animation so since i really only want to take on my own animation work given how time consuming it is for right now i'm in no rush to include that section but i will down the line it also helps keep the portfolio more simplistic so this is what i ended up with and immediately the work is just so much more vibrant i've taken advantage of the monthly paintings for vico's backpack trading cards and some of the skill building from those have really paid off these qualify a bit more as illustrations though so down the page i have some of the simple one-offs the poses and the turnarounds for characters this may not be the exact way that you should lay your portfolio out but make sure that it suits your purposes for example i have to think about why someone is coming to my portfolio page there are potential clients for one thing but there may simply be interested fans or people that want to learn more about my characters or want to get into biko's backpack or people who want to take the learn character design course and go well wait can he put his money where his mouth is from here i'd still love to put together some case study pages that do some writing that goes more in depth but honestly there's plenty of me talking about the thought process and making of these pieces on this channel that i'm in no rush i've been a working artist for almost 15 years now and trying to show everything i've ever done or can do is not going to fit on one digestible page i've done some things things that i'm proud of this is not necessarily a portfolio that shows off my full range but it does i think show my strengths and maybe that's the best way to approach portfolios you can get my course learned character design over at learncharacterdesign.com it's over 18 hours of a comprehensive character design curriculum and you can get bikko's backpack which is basically a new hard enamel pin and foil trading card of the month club over at patreon.com bagel denizen this is what this month looks like i have some really exciting news to share with you that i don't think i'm allowed to share until the 16th and today's it's going up on the 15th so make sure you're following me at bageldenison on instagram twitter twitch and ticktalk i will share the news on at least one of those places thank you so much for watching and have fun creating question for you guys down in the comments what's the weirdest thing that some random guy harassed you about for two months on dribble and why was that a little cartoon pig that he thought was an attempt to cyber hack him really

Channel: Brookes Eggleston - Character Design Forge

Views: 20,140

Keywords: art portfolio, portfolio making, portfolio tips, portfolio review, brookes eggleston, character design forge, character design, character design portfolio, illustration portfolio, art careers, art work, getting art jobs, client work

Id: VA2GP5kBx9o

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021