In the last post I talked about leading with your strongest
piece and closing with a great piece - but how do you know what’s strong and what’s great? I went over this some in my last post. This is where online
critiques can be of enormous value.
I took my rep’s advice seriously, and restructured my
portfolio based on his comments. At the time all the work in my portfolio was
work I’d done in college.
Note: I’ll discuss
formal education versus being self-taught later on, but for now it’s worth
noting that one advantage of formal education is that you will, in the course
of your academic pursuit, build a body of work.
I have some suggestions on building a body of work for your
portfolio whether or not you already have some existing pieces.
If you produced pieces in college, use that work - but be
very judicious about it. A sad truth is that clients don’t really care to see
much college work. What they would most like to see is work that you’ve done
for other clients.
Okay, but you’re just starting out so you don’t have a
portfolio filled with work from actual commercial projects. What do you do?
Apply all the points laid out in the previous
post. Start to replace college work with actual commercial work as soon as
possible but only if the commercial work is good.
A lot of beginning artists make some large mistakes here.
They realize that showing commercial work - work that someone has actually paid
to have created - is a better option than showing college work, but fail to
evaluate the work very carefully simply because it is commercial. Just because
someone paid for it doesn’t mean it
belongs in your portfolio.
I’ve done many a piece in my career that I was paid for, but
would never put in my portfolio. Not because it was bad but because it wasn’t great.
The purpose of your portfolio isn’t to demonstrate that someone has hired you
to do work - It’s to demonstrate that you can,
and have produced great work.
When you’re starting out you will not have a large body of
great commercial pieces in your portfolio though, so how do you create a strong
portfolio with this limitation?
You create self promotion
pieces!
In theory, these pieces won’t be any more ‘commercial’ than
college generated work, but a significant difference is that you have complete
control in the direction of their creation. The strategy would be to create
pieces that target the areas you would like to work in. If you’d like to do
product illustration work, for instance, do your research on product
illustration. Find some great examples,
pick some products and do some illustrations. Voila!
Some advantages of self promotion pieces:
- There are no restrictions
or deadlines to meet. You can put as much time and effort into them as you
like. Bear in mind though, that spending months on a piece is a luxury
that you won’t likely have with a real commercial project.
- Since you are picking the
subject matter, you can target your pieces very precisely to fit your
prospective clients.
- A client always likes to
detect motivation in a prospective artist. Creating self promotion pieces
demonstrates a willingness to take on extra effort.
Note: A fair number of
self promotion pieces that you see were originally created as one of several
options for a specific project. It was
just not one picked by the client. The
artist liked it well enough, though, to want to include it in their portfolio.
If this is the case, don’t be deceptive and imply that it was part of a
commercial project. It is unlikely that
clients will ever ask, but If questioned, be sure and let them know the actual
motivation for it.
Whatever the origin of your work, it’s mostly going to be
based on the strength of the pieces themselves. So make them great!
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