Transcripts
1. W2 V1 What makes a good Portfolio: All right, everyone, this week is all about performance, and let's just get right down to it. So what we're gonna do is we're going to start off with a checklist of some few key things that go across Europe rent portfolio and your website before. But I need purple or any artwork you put out there. There's a few key things that I want you to keep in mind. And remember that these are the key things. Number one. No student worker exercises that all in your portfolio. Not only do these make you seem amateur, Ah, lot of schools tend to do the same projects, and you'll just have exactly the same stuff as somebody else. Uh, when you're adding stuff to your portfolio, you always want to keep it professional, and you always want to have a professional looking work. It doesn't necessarily have to be worked. It comes from doing work. Freelancing are working in the studio. You can create your own job on your own projects and stuff like that. We'll talk about that, but no student work whatsoever. The number images you need, you only really need four images. If you have four really strong images. That is enough to get you work. Anything less than that. People think that you don't have enough work or or you're hiding something or something like that. But if you have four really good pieces, that's kind of the cut off for where you wet. So you want to really trim the fat down, take away any work that it's kind of mediocre and only have your four good pieces. You can have more, I choose. Did you five. But four is kind of the minimum. Art directors tend to judge you on your best piece, but they'll actually hire you on your worst piece. And what do I mean by that? They'll look at your best piece and and see what the limit is of what you can accomplish and what kind of great work you can dio. But they'll actually judge you and decide whether to hire you by the worst piece in your portfolio, because what that does is it shows them what they're gonna get it. Something goes terribly wrong and you give them something that's bad. You know, things happen. Sometimes you just don't understand the project or you think one thing and the art director is thinking something else, and it's just not driving. Or maybe you're just not feeling it so much on that project. Sometimes this stuff happens, and what they want to know is on the worst day possible. What is the lower limit? What is your Your floor? What kind of stuff? You're gonna hand it, sir, If your worst piece is at a professional quality and at a high standard, then they're more likely to hire you because on the worst day, they know they're going to still going to get something that usable within their project within their deadline. You want your portfolio to tell a story. Now, not only does your purple, you have to show exactly what it is you want to do. So if you want to be a character designer should have ah, lot of characters, if not all characters. If you want to do environments or if you wanted to comic books that should be all comic book type are it's okay to break things up in the sub categories. So if you're doing comics and you, you know you have five pieces in there of doing pencils and you want to add a one coloring that's cool. If you want to have two separate things where it's maybe one you're doing, all acting as a color is another one. Your acting is an anchor or or whatever. You can break it up in the sub categories. It's better to focus on one, especially when you're you're starting out. But don't just have random things in it. You want to kind of focus on one. At least make sure one is takes up 80% or that they're both really strong. You have five of each, and you can show them different portfolios that are kind of your different brands that we talked about in the first week. Next, you want to start strong and you want a finish strong. You know what does that mean? It means you want to put your best pieces at the front and at the back. You don't want to just put your best piece right up front and then have your foot for the trail off near the end. You want to kind of have a flow to it, so it's, you know, you want to kind of maybe hike your your more mediocre pieces of your lesser pieces somewhere in the middle, but you want definitely have a flow to it. So if you have five pieces, you could go strong. Maybe not so strong, kind of strong, maybe not so strong and a strong kid. Usually, I like to finish my portfolio on the strongest piece at the end, but sometimes when you're going through, hopefully you never actually make it to the end. Depending on how many pieces you have, that's when you want to keep it small. Keep it concise by keeping it concise. You leave them wanting more. If they want to get more, you can give them a leave behind a card of some of your work or maybe a business card or something of that nature. Um, putting up books always works well as a leave behind, but I would only spend money on printing books if you're going to use those books to sell to your fan base. Also, they're not really great for elite behind for the actual art directors themselves showing developmental work in your poeple. It was a great idea, but you shouldn't make it the strong point. So if you want to show sketches and stuff. That's fine, but they should have showed the sequence between sketches to more tightly nears two colors to the final artwork and show that all the way across. But you want to make the final artwork the showpiece, and the rest just supports the story. Sometimes people have a significant piece or a piece that they're known for. If that's the case, put it right up front in the front of your portfolio. That way, when someone see that, they say, Oh, you're that guy and then they move on and get into the rest of your portfolio. You don't really want to hide that stuff at the end because a lot of it is about personal connections and about remembering you and not to the thing. So you have a piece that automatically clicks in their mind. They kind of know you. You're already starting off on a better foot. If you don't have enough work in your portfolio that is professional and looks commercial, then you need to create yourself. That works that you need to create yourself a project in order to do that. So, for example, if you want to be a concept artist, you've got to create yourself a project to do. Don't copy of somebody else's I p and build something in their world. You want to use your imagination and your abilities to create something that fits. So you would do all the character sketches of everything in that world. Or if you want to do environment design, you can do that. Or, if you want to do comic books, make yourself a comic book. Um, from start to finish, usually with a comic book, usually four or five pages. Even the 45 page comic book with, you know, a bunch of panels on each page is more than enough to get you in the door producing your comic book. Also, will I give you elite nice leave behind on and you can also use it To sell to your fan base is well, what I suggest, and we'll talk about it in a couple weeks. But if you're going to create yourself a project to do, the best thing to do is create yourself a product rather than a project. Why? Because if you're gonna put on all that time to create something new, why don't you make something that you can sell and use to generate some income. So you're not just wasting, you know, 40 80 100. Whatever. You're not wasting weeks creating work for no reason other than just portfolio pieces. Why not create work that works for you? That you can make money and generate revenue from in order to get a heads? And you're not sitting in your house creating our work just for the hope of getting a job. You're creating artwork to generate money for yourself. Guys, I hope you like this video I hope you now knows and some key things that go into your portfolio what you're actually looking for as always. If you have any questions, get in touch when you poster of purple, of what you have or what you're thinking in the comments. Dumbbell, Lower in the door score group and other people can take a look. If you you get stuck in that sort of thing, you can contact Mitch and maybe we can figure out something to do with portfolios. Are that sort of thing kind of help people along because I know some people are get kind of stuck when they're judging your own work. One thing I will suggest is never ask your mom or your dad or someone really close to you. But we're portfolio. They will always tell you that everything is awesome. And you are amazing. Andi, that's not helpful at all. So I would always reach out to somebody that you respect and community on an artist that you respect. Or, you know, maybe someone that doesn't have any knowledge about art whatsoever and ask them what they think and what they think they you do. And what you like to draw on that sort of thing. And that a really key you in into ideas of what? You're actually doing it right or not again. I hope you enjoy this video in the next video. We're gonna talk about print for folios. And then in the video after that weird talk specifically about websites again. I hope you guys enjoyed this and I'll see you in the next booth.
2. W2 V2 What You Are Projecting 2: hi guys. So I thought this was a key point, so I would take it out of the other video of a good portfolio of bad portfolio. What I really want you to focus on is what you are projecting is what you are gonna end up getting back. So what you're showing in your portfolio is exactly the kind of work that you're gonna get . So in Week One, you decided on what it is you want to do or you're trying to figure that out now. So what you need to do is get your portfolio to project that you also want your portfolio to project that you are a professional. If you're out of work, it looks amateur. And how you're presenting it looks amateur. Then people will think you're an amateur. If you haven't looking professional, that people will assume that you are a professional. People are really bad at extrapolating what you can do, so you may put up a piece that you think is rendered really well and shows off your technical skill. But someone looking at that cannot extrapolated that you can apply that to something that they do, unless it looks exactly like what they're looking for. You may be skilled at photo shop. You may be skilled at creating art composition and lighten all that stuff. But if it doesn't relate to what they want, they can't put 11 together to get that. So what we really mean is, say, I'm looking for someone to do, you know, create characters and be a character artist, or I want someone to be a comic book artist. A pencil. Er, if you don't have any pencils in your portfolio, I can't extrapolated your drawing from being able to do pencils. I can't extrapolate you drawing vehicles to drawing characters. So if you want a certain type of work, you need to have that specific work in your portfolio. I don't have a bunch of random stuff. Don't have a bunch of mishmash of stuff. We talked about it last week. You want to be focused and show them the exactly the work that you want. The downside is if you show something that you don't want, people are going to give you that work. This is what I see a lot of the time with artists that are just starting out. They will put in a bunch of work that they think people want to see, not realizing that people will see that and give them that work. Don't just Philip your before. Well, with what you have, figure out exactly what you want to do and fill it up with that kind of work Guys again. I hope you enjoy this video and I'll see you in the next one.
3. W2 V3 Web Porfolio 3: Alright guys. So let's get right down to this is the main mean potatoes of this thing. So this video is probably be the longest one out of all of them. This is gonna be about your personal website. For me, this is the all important thing. This is what you're gonna send our clients now. A lot of business is through email and in that sort of thing, I have a ton of clients. I would say probably 80%. My clients. I've never actually heard their voice or talked to or that person. It's all been through email and your website is the key to that because it is your online presence that's out there. So I have a few key rules for your portfolio that I would set you suggest to you to follow right out the back. The number one question I get is Do I need my own website with my own domain name and that sort of thing and I would say absolutely Yes, without question. That's what you need to do to be a professional, to be taken seriously. This is one step towards that. Don't go within our station site. Don't go with B hands or any of that stuff. Get your own website. If you're good at building it, you can build it in WordPress there. That sort of thing has locked the great layouts and stuff like that. Or you can get more, uh, laid out the site, like through squarespace or something like that worth later for you. And it's nice and clean. We'll talk about this stuff a little more as we go in things of having your own domain and having your own website is. You also get an email address with that Domains of your domain is your name. Um, you could have me at your inane dot com. So for me personally, my main site is Shane madden dot com. Sometimes it's really hard to get your website name because it's already been taken. When I registered my first sight, actually it was taken, and I had to go with shame that design at the time, and then I put in a request for in the other name was given up that I could purchase it, buy it on. That's how I ended up getting my name back. And now I will never try to let it go. I've even bought my kids names now so that when they grow up, they want to start a business. Maybe they have their domains already pre purchased for them, So it's a little bit of foresight. Yes, I'm going to be paying years of domain name registrations, but in the end it is worth it. And I don't have to worry about somebody else poaching those names. So for me, it's really easy to be Shane and Shane men dot com. You could be me at me dot com Hermia, Shane madden dot com or whatever it is, it looks a little bit more professional. Barring that an email address. Go with your name at I would recommend Gmail for for email if you're not gonna have your own domain so you could be Shane Madden. Mind specifically, shame that. Art at gmail dot com. Really simple, really easy to remember and says Exactly what I do next tip for your website is to keep it clean. You don't want a flashing lights blinking stuff. That's a good thing. You want to keep it nice and clean and designed and professional. Next little tip is to keep your artwork above the fold. What does that mean? You shouldn't have to scroll or click to see any of your portfolio Are worker. That sort of thing should be right there right after that, right in your face. Art directors of very busy people and you want to get it right in front their face that they can use it as quickly as possible on Get into your artwork right away. Always remember that your website is about the artwork. It's not about your resume or client list or any of that almost of secondary and adds to the story. But people are there to see your artwork, so make sure that your artwork is front and center and the main focus of your website. Always use big pictures. Try to avoid thumbnails as much as possible. I always used to do a thing of the worst website and why your website sucks. Because so many artists of that have really crappy websites, a tely east from an art directors point of view of hiring people, you want to make it as easy as possible for the art director so they don't want to have to click and scroll through a bunch of images and click on a small little front nails and open them all up in different tabs and that sort of thing. They want to be able to go see your site, taking a bunch of artwork at all in once and say, Yes, I want to hire this person or no, I don't think this person's ready or I'm going to keep on moving on. So you want to show you as much information. Sorry. So you want to show them is many big images as possible? All of your artwork should be Hlinka ble and down Low Dubel art director is nine times out . Attend Don't have a project for you right now. They're looking ahead to projects down the future, and what they'll do is they will download your artwork and keep it in a file for when a project comes up that fits your particular style. The other thing that they like to do is they like to link it to other people. What happens with a lot of art directors is they have a project that comes in. They like your style that would fit to that project. They attach you with it, send it back to their boss and say, I would like to hire this person for that project. What do you think? You think they're a good fit? It's not always their decision right off. And if your stuff is really easy to Lincoln and move around and that sort of thing without having the downloaded reattaching all that stuff on it makes their life easier, and it makes you look back. Filling out the meta information and the file name with your name and contact information is another key piece to finding you on the Internet in getting you hired. There's lots of times where your artwork it's passed around. Ah, lot of people are really worried about copyright and all that sort of thing. The reality is, if you put it on the Internet, it's going to get out there. So what, you want to do it? You want to load up images that aren't too high of arrest but are nice high rez that people can use, but not high enough to necessarily using a print scenario or that sort of thing. Um, and you wanna have your name on it, so if it does get passed around that shows up on somebody's Pinterest or whatever, and someone comes across that they're easily able to track you down. My other big no, no for your website is outbound links to other things like Facebook, Twitter, that sort of thing. What happens is people will go to your website and they'll start looking at your artwork and then they'll say who this person is Twitter and then they go to the Twitter and then they're like, Oh, this person is following this person and at that point, they're gone and they were off your site and they're falling down the rabbit hole there following Other people are looking at other pages and that sort of thing. You want to keep them to you and interact with you and, you know, hire you and send you an email and say, I have work for you. So you want to limit the number outgoing links as possible and have as many coming into you as you possibly can. Having links coming into you also helps with your Google searches and raising yourself up in Hess CEO now s you know, in your website is another big plus. We won't get into that now. It's not really a Web design course per se, but there's lots of great books out there on s yelling. Or you can contact somebody that's really good in the getting your stuff s CEO for those of you that don't know it, sir. Gender optimization. It helps Google find you. You being at the top of the list for certain categories can really help you out with landing certain jobs, especially if you're very specialized in what you do. Having those keywords from coming up on the top of the list of those certain keywords can really give you an edge over other people. Ah, lot of times art directors will, you know, not scroll down through three or four people. So I'm sorry. Three or four pages. So if your label yourself as a concept artists and they're searching for a concept are on, you don't show up until, like page 20 or 30. They're not gonna find you that way. So, you know, S e yelling will help you get a few steps forward and matter really help you out in your career. Another thing you might want to do is you might want to categorize your work. So if you have, you know a few different things. If you're going, going conference cept are you really couldn't decide which one you want to go for character or a vehicle, you can characterize your thing into different categories. Another way that people like to break things up is per job. So if you did a bunch of artwork for one particular job, you could have a label that under one job that you did, and then you could have another section, another job. That's a great way to break the boat from just a couple. Quick dotes never have a lot of like videos or music playing on your side. It gets really annoying, especially in a work environment. Don't have a contact form is the only way to get touch with you. People should be able to click right away and get into email to get right to you. You have to fill it a long form to contact with you. That's actually kind of too much work for our director to do so. Try to avoid that at all costs. In terms of image size, I would say never have an image that smaller than about 800 pixels. Usually, if people want to use kind of like the males and little smaller burdens so they get more, there are work on the screen. I would say this this is my rule of thumb is if I look on your website on a mobile site, the wit should be the full with of my phone guys. I really hope these tips were helpful to you down below. There's a There's a worksheet kind of the checklist that you can go through when you start building your website. If you want to toss up your website into the discord group or comments down below, people can comment on it and kind of give you a helping hand. Just recommendations for What's that? I always like to recommend Squarespace. That's what I use personally, I also use WordPress. I kind of have a dislike on for WordPress right now. I've had a lot of issues with upgrading and updating it and having broken my whole site, the lighthouse itself is built on WordPress. But my actual site, if you look at it, is actually in squarespace. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you've got a lot of great tips out of it that will help you build your Web presence and help to build your portfolio. To be that a little bit stronger again. If you have any questions, please shoot myself for Mitch, a message. We'll try and get back to you as quickly as possible. If you like this video, leave a comment down below, letting us know. Andi, I will see you in the next one.
4. W2 V4 Print Portfolio 4: Alright, guys, In this video, we are going to talk about print portfolios or actual physical performance. You can break whether it's Port Royal that looks like this and a finder or a portfolio Elektronik on your iPad. They're kind of the same thing. They're kind of just two different ways of doing it. Number one right off the bat. First rule Do not show original artwork. Everything you show should be reproductions. We don't do any sort of original artwork in commercial art. So you're trying to get a job? Will show original artwork doing time. You wanna show original artwork if you actually want to sell it to somebody Other than that , keep it home. Short story. I had a friend who had is a portfolio full of all original artwork. He was on his way to a job interview and he was in a taxi cab. When he got out of said cab, he did not have his portfolio with him. He never got his portfolio back in all that original work, which was years and years of work, probably the past, you know, 5 10 years worth of work was gone in an instant. Don't do it. Leave all that original artwork at home Number two. Now these books are great. These air portfolio books that you could have sleeves and put in your artwork on show all your development working that these books are great. They come in different sizes. What I would suggest is 11 by 17 is probably the biggest size. Don't carry around a portfolio. There's nothing worse than pulling other giant fine art director, but the smaller the better. Stay away from shiny sleeves. What happens is you get under show lights when you're showing things and stuff, you can see it here. You get a lot of glare on it that is bad, and that's annoying. And that detracts from how your artwork actually looks. So what you want to do is you want to get Matt Portfolio. I don't actually use this portfolio anymore. I mostly send links to my website or have leave behind, so this is a little archaic. This was probably hasn't been used for almost 10 years. I would say Thea other thing that happens is thes. Get dirt on them and moving around in your bag and traveling and stuff like that. They get little scratches in it on. They tend to get scuffed up and look terrible. Um, what people have kind of moved on to is Elektronik portfolios On your iPad, you can download a whole bunch of things I would highly suggest getting yourself into, like, I believe it's one called Folio Block, and there's minimal, minimal folio that work really well. Don't rely on WiFi because the odds of you actually having WiFi working are pretty few and far behind. Tablets themselves are ideal for showing. Do not show portfolios on your phone. It's parties small and do not show portfolios on your laptop. It's really annoying to pull it a laptop and have a big, funky thing. Andi, have everybody huddled around, at least with in iPad or any other time, android tablet or something. You have real estate, and you can pass it off to the art director and that sort of thing. One of the big things with print portfolios is you're going to get judged on your color reproduction, everything that you show you're going to get judged on. So the color of your prints, the quality of your prints and that sort of thing all influence what the art director sees . So take some time, get some high quality prints from from a reputable printer. Believe it or not, the UPS stores and stuff like that do have some high quality print facilities. Get yourself some nice prints. Don't cheat Botha. Don't try and do it at home on a printer where the the ink is running out, or things of that nature. Spend some time on it. Spend some money on it, get it straight and get it right. Another great thing to do is actually having a printed book. These samples of other people's ah printed book of your artwork. They're great as leave behind. Also, at one point when I was doing some pretty powerful lives, I would get some books printed, you know, 10 pages printed has all your information on it, that sort of thing. It's a great leave behind. Another great leave behind is actually business cards clean, simple. Your name, contact information, maybe a piece of artwork on the back that help you stand out that you can give to the art director at the end. The great part of actually having a physical portfolio and meeting somebody in person to show them that portfolio is actually being able to ask him questions and getting feedback on your portfolio right away. Whenever you're getting at a portfolio review from somebody, always ask for the most truthful information. Some people in there, they're looking at your work will, you know, maybe not not be is harsh with you or is truthful with the quality of the work. You always wanna ask them what they think truthfully. That way you can make any adjustments down the road and you could make yourself better. That don't take it personally if if you know they say bad things, it's not about you. It's about the artwork is all about growing intolerable. Getting stronger on making it better. Don't make excuses or demean your working friends. Somebody. There's nothing worse than sitting there making excused from it all. I did that late at night. Her Oh, I you know, I This happened in blood over the work is the work in this T shirt stand on itself. Don't make excuses for it. Don't try and sway Thea directors point of view of something because it's not gonna work. It is okay to ask for feedback from somebody. If they're taking the time to review with work, it's OK to ask them. Teoh just quickly give you their thoughts or that sort of thing, or even from another artist. They're taking their time on the day to actually look at it. Most art directors are all too happy to give you some tip. It's information to help you progress along the way. The one thing you should never do, and I've actually seen it happen more often than not, is argue with the art director. Never tell them they're wrong. Never say I don't believe in your opinion or anything like that. Take what they say. Nod, smile. Be polite. If you want to go home and disregard what they say, that's fine. But never, ever argue with the art director. They're doing their job. They haven't opinion. They're not out to get. You never argue or disagree with guys. I hope you like this video on print portfolios. Nowadays, they're they're kind of unless you're going to like comic cons and things like that, They're kind of few and far between. Sometimes when you're setting up meetings with people, you'll bring in a portfolio I have found nowadays, most in my portfolio, when stuff is done, Web based, and they have already seen my work before. They call me in for a meeting or or that sort of thing. It's always good to have a portfolio on hand, and you should always have one ready to go. It's even better when you have a portfolio for your specific genre. So say they Last week, you decided on three different runners. Hit have three separate portfolios for each one, and then whenever you get contacted by one, you can pull of that portfolio, get ready to go and show up. The last point I'm going to say about Portfolio is always make sure the actual portfolio cases clean doesn't have stickers all over it. You, you know, take a little bit of shoe polish and polish that thing up and make it nice and clean and shiny and professional and tight. Guys, I hope you like this video. We're going to move on into your Web and your audience building portfolios again. I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you in the next one
5. W2 V5 Audience Builders 5: Let's talk about your audience building portfolios now. What do I mean by audience building portfolios? We said any other video that your need to get a website that is your own unique domain and way walked two reasons for that. Now what I call audience building websites or audience building portfolios are your art stations in your draw crowds and your tumblers tak tastic, Facebook patri on instagram. Anything that's linked to a social media and can help you build an audience. These things are very useful. People that want to sell products or things of that nature to build your audience, to sell that. So, by all means, use these platforms use which ever ones relate to what you're doing. You can spend your whole life updating these portfolios. There's so many of them. Each industry in each market tends to have ah, specific one that's useful, like Instagram Instagram's really useful for, You know she's showing preliminary work and stuff like that, too, to raise your audience level deviant art. You know, again, if you want to build sort of a following that sort of thing where people enjoy your work in and that sort of thing you can use that leverage that into selling T shirts and prince and stuff like that. Or if you want to go to a Web comic rope, that's a really good opportunity to grow your audience. Now there's only one thing that I recommend with these sites, and that is that they always link back to your site. So every image that you put up has ah ah Lincoln a meta information and in the file name is your name in your contact information. On down in the corner, you put a little water mark of your website, that sort of thing. So everything direct back to your website. So if someone comes across your image on Pinterest or whatever it is that they know exactly who did it and where to go to seed, war or contact you again, you don't want a link from your website out to these sites. If at all possible, usually you want to keep it is a one way street to these websites again, going back to last week, you need to figure out find what bits exactly award you and your market what you're trying to do again. Everybody's different. Everybody has a different market. Everybody has a different style of R and different audience that they're they're going for . So do your research and choose the audience that is right for you as always. Guys, I hope you like this video and I will see you in the next one.
6. W2 V6 Recap 6: So to recap this week, we learned all about portfolios, whether be print portfolios, our website and online portfolios as well as our audience builders. Guys, eyes always download the worksheets down below. You can also download the audio files for this to listen to it on the go. It's not a race. Take your time to do this. It may seem like this this week doesn't have a lot of work involved into it. But this is one of the hardest weeks is getting your portfolio together because if you have nothing to show than it's hard to to show the clients that we're going to go after next week. Like I said before week to week three go hand in hand. So don't try and jump the gun. Now is the time to spend the time and bring your portfolio up to a higher level. As always, Guys, if you like this video sign up to the weapon are down below. Leave a comment down below and I will see you in the next one
Shane Madden, Illustrator. Educator. Creater
