I would like to request you do more humorous comics. The icon looks good so far. Do you want the pattern too ooze like the liquid or stay static like the argyle you have now? It could be a static pattern of liquid drops maybe?
The textures are great, the argyle is great, the palette on the wolves piece is great, the icon is great, the middle panel where your outfit turns into a onesie is great, everything is great.
The textures are great, the argyle is great, the palette on the wolves piece is great, the icon is great, the middle panel where your outfit turns into a onesie is great, everything is great.
I agree it all looks so great..... however, Iruka, did you stop drawing girls in dragon suit ?
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
Arden, I dont plan on animating the pattern at all, I was thinking of doing a rippling lava sort of pattern though. As for funny comics, I have thought about starting a funny comic tumblr, but I would be in a sea of many.
Fug, thanks dude.
Fantomas, My avatar is still the same, though the suit is a much less literal hoodie now, and I seem to draw myself way less.
Aren't you kind of in a sea of many no matter where you submit work in whatever medium or format?
What does it matter how many others do it if yours is better?
I suppose you are right. I have a habit of holding out on projects and thinking "well this isnt my best yet, so Im not going to put it out" I have a comic baby that I've been coddling for maybe.... 5 years? it gets closer and closer to "IM READY YES" but I'm certainly not heading my own advice with that particular thing. Maybe I just need people to yell at me about it.
If I set an artificial deadline, like, 3 months, for a small preview of my comic and its universe, would a few people on the forums be willing to hold me to that deadline?
I'd hold you to it, though I'm not quite sure how much weight my own impressions really carry with you. All the same there are many here who also would support you in this. I say go for it!
I made a sketch for this 3 months ago but just got to it. Decided I would relax and paint something that wasn't for anything, so crazy dogs came out. I need to do some sketchbook scanning as well.
Look at all the shit on there and assess if you were going to give me a job. Right now, there's not enough that directly applies to the industry. I need to clean up my portfolio and re design the sections to better present myself as a creative thinker.
I'm picking through some old work to maybe improve upon, or just add, as is, to the portfolio. Help me by making the following choices:
Iruka! I think you should:
- Improve/touch up the following works and add them:(list numbers)
- Add the following works to your portfolio as is, they are fine already:(list numbers)
- I think you need a work like this in your portfolio, but you need to start from scratch:(numbers)
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
I would also appreciate:
1) Crits on the site
2) Questions and suggestions about my progress overall
3) Suggestions for assignments for myself.
For now, I'm looking at 2D artist and concept art positions, I know they are the rarest of them, but they are where I'd be the most happy. I will also start building up a little more storyboarding/animation stuff soon.
I have some reservations about giving advice to someone in a field I'm not super familiar with, but I think you already know a lot of what you want to change.
Iruka! I think you should:
have a resume somewhere- if you don't want name/#/address out there, at least do a highlight reel of where you school'd and what you've work'd.
- Improve/touch up the following works and add them: 6
- Add the following works to your portfolio as is, they are fine already: 1/2
- I think you need a work like this in your portfolio, but you need to start from scratch: 3/4, 11
Those cowpokes are pretty busy, visually speaking. I feel like there are too many ideas being explored in each one to really see them as "Here's six versions of the same guy." There's also some general feature overload going on; the colors aren't always enhancing the defining attributes of the character.
In terms of jobget, The current portfolio stuff looks super mobile-appy. Your general stylistic approach to things gets me very stuck in the neighborhood of these: X X X X
and superduper X.
Basically as an art director or somesuch I know that playful, saturated, bright and punchy cartoony graphics have done well on mobile platforms and are likely to continue being very attached to that sector, and that's what I'm seeing from you.
There's a distinct lack of people in your showcase work, which is not to say character design so much as just figures and less stylized renderings. With what you have displayed right now, I would hire you, but not for work that involved the cool animated characters I'm pretty sure you'd love to be doing. I might pay you to make a really cool set of shapes for my match-3 iOS game (See textureballs / Elemental game linked above), and draw an almanac of cool unlocks and abilities you gain as you progress in the game (. The environments and textures/plants would give me confidence that you could do a cool splash screen or background for said puzzler, but I would probably leave the talking heads / character art to someone else.
I totally agree with all your points. I was originally curving my portfolio pretty hard to mobile, because that's where the freelance seems to be. So far, Mobile companies tend to be a bit unstable/indecisive and the freelance can dry up pretty fast, though, so I really want to rework my range.
You are also right about the lack of people. I will have to fix that, for sure.
I don't really know what an employer would be looking for, but I'll give this a shot:
- Improve/touch up the following works and add them: 1+2 (combine them in to one), 9
- Add the following works to your portfolio as is, they are fine already: 5
- I think you need a work like this in your portfolio, but you need to start from scratch: 11
Pieces 1 and 2 are really great, but they'd be even better I think if you could show them in the context of a environment.
Your website says a lot about your art, but it doesn't say all that much about you. Also the contact information should be more than a tiny grey piece of text in the footer.
Your PDF lacks a grid structure, and it feels a little like things are just slapped on the page wherever. It's not terrible, but it could look better if you figured out a system of organisation.
6 to 9 of the pieces you posted are some of the most interesting in your portfolio, not because they're your best work but because they show your thinking and working process. You could try putting some annotations alongside them to show which decisions you made and why, every employer I've spoken to in the design industry at least has said that stuff is really valuable to them.
My two cents:
(I apologize for the length, it may be a little overwhelming- I just went through the whole thing top to bottom without really editing. I also didn't edit for "hey here is what's realistic to accomplish in X amount of time"- I don't know what your timeframe is or how long it takes you to do these things, so I'm just throwing out everything that occurs to me, and letting you use your discretion about what feedback you feel you can use. Sorry if it's too much, I don't mean to take the wind out of your sails here.)
You already pretty much got at the big thing I'm going to say here, which is the applicability of a lot of the work you've got going on isn't as strong as it could be. It's all really cool stuff, but some polish and focus here and there will make it seem a lot less art studenty and a lot more, "yes, I can plop this person down in our art department today and feel that they'll be able to produce the work that we need right away." The technical art skills aren't in question here- you've definitely got what it takes, in my estimation- just the ability to present yourself as someone with relevant knowledge on the production side of things.
Going through these 1 at a time-
Website:
Stand by the same thing I said a year ago. Melting birds should be axed, reduced in number, or consolidated- it may be fun stuff to look at and draw, but it doesn't really demonstrate how your work applies to game work. Ditto for cloud headed guy. Wolf faced guy may or may not freak out art directors easily scared of furries (might be able to diffuse that concern by supplementing it with a full-body shot/turnarounds/etc. establishing it more as a character design model sheet.)
Also yes, it needs a resume- or at least some acknowledgement of your schooling. I don't care about that, and an art director who knows anything probably won't care, but it may mean something to an HR droid who likely doesn't know any better, and they may be the gate that keeps you from your portfolio making it to an art director.
.PDF:
Might want to add your name and some info to each page using a consistent layout- a bar on the the bottom or something. If someone prints this out when going through portfolio candidates it's good to reinforce your name and make sure people can figure out who did the art if the pages get scattered to the winds.
The first page (with the trees and the junk yard) is really strong. Stuff broken out into discrete assets, it's fun to look at and professional. Wish there was more stuff like this- stuff that is directly game applicable. Especially nice for mobile work.
Second page is really nice, but it would be nice if there were a few more items, or some indication of how these items would apply to a game- if they are meant to be icons, reduce them down to icon size, or show what the rollover state would be, or however they work.
Third page- it's all nice work, but the balls and the skin texture things do appear to be more personal or school study exercises than something that necessarily belongs in a portfolio. Better to use the lessons learned on a real concept.
The textures are pretty nice, but if you're doing texture work in a portfolio you'll probably want to have A) more examples and 3d objects/scenes using your texture work. Much of the time modelers do their own texturing, and even if they don't, it's good to show that you've got a good handle on how the textures will work when lit and rendered (normal maps would also help show you understand that process as well). Might want to talk to Prox or ND more about that, I think they have more relevant experience than I do on that front.
Fourth page- dog and cat would need more explanation on how these concepts actually would be used in a game. Is it for a 3d game? Turnarounds or a 3/4 read view would help. Also making sure you have a version that's close to a bind pose than these posed version would be useful; as a concept artist doing model packets, your job is to communicate to the modelers what they need to know- right now I don't know what these guys would look like standing up, or how I would model them so they could animate, so they could be rigged.
Teal dog is good. Not sure if you need the pencil sketch, since it's largely redundant with the color one- if there's information you're trying to get across (ie: relevance of the eyes being back vs forward), isolate the head and note what the relevance is ("ie: When dog is in Blaragara Mode, ears are swept back"). Other sketches are the start of a good idea, but not given enough detail to be properly impressive in a portfolio. Make them bigger and detail them out, they'll be good.
This page should probably be 2 or 3 pages instead of 1: one for the teal dog and 1 or 2 for the cartoony cat and dog, depending on how much elaboration you add to them.
Fifth page- Card is a cool illustration, but it would probably work better if you had a series of them, along with card back design and maybe a pack design as well- something that can be presented as a cohesive asset set, rather than a standalone illustration which may not relate to game work.
You and the monster is cool, but it feels more like an "inspiring" concept piece than a "make this asset" piece- so it would probably benefit from having a background to flesh out the world these characters live in, rather than cropped against plain white. It's quite visually arresting, so I'd imagine someone going through your portfolio or interviewing you would have some questions on what's going on here, what the context is- a little big more fleshing out with an environment would make a convincing argument that this isn't just a weird, cool thing (which isn't that useful by itself) and is in fact a weird, cool, cohesive and well-thought out thing (which is very useful.)
Post:
1+2) Flowers are cool- might want to polish up the green branch holding up the one plant, looks a but lazy just being flat. Reduce the size or ax the sketch on the far right of #2, it looks a lot less finished than the others. Red pod plan on the bottom doesn't seem as finished as the others, could use some polishing. If you have an enviroment BG these belong to, it would be good to show at a small example of how these fit into the the broader scheme of things.
3+4) I know I saw these awhile back and gave them the thumbs up, but Moly's talk about busyness jostled my brain a bit, so now I've got a concern about them. Were these to be concepts for a game, what kind of game? 2d sprites? Flash? 3d? They're quite detailed to the point where they would be difficult to animate in Flash (if that was the intention, an example of a vectorized version would be in order, with a few frames of animation preferable, showing how those tendrilly coattails work), but you haven't given a clear example of how one of these characters would translate into a fully realized 3d model.
Is the single color/grey something that would be carried over into the final model? Or is that just something used for this iterative design phase? How would this color palette work with the environment of a game? Would the backgrounds be greyed out as well? (You don't necessarily need to draw out a envrio concept for these guys (though it would be nice), but having an answer would be nice. Even just some notes that were like, (The Gragerblagger Gang is identified by teal trim in their costumes) or some such would help it establish these characters as part of a cohesive whole, art direction-wise. Also, a more finished version of one or two of these characters given their own separate page would be helpful- front and back views and detail shots/sketches of areas that may be unclear to modelers (What's underneath this poncho, do you actually see this guy's eyes or what, how does that sword work exactly, etc.)
5) Covered that in .pdf
6-9) Cool. Might want a color back and a side view of the turnaround, though. Also it's not entirely clear that 8+9 are the same character, so a quick x-ray type sketch showing how the legs fit into the funky pants of 9 might be in order. Definitely more like this if you want to do 3d character design.
10) Covered that in .pdf
11) These might be ok for comps for a painting, but they don't seem to have much going on that makes them game relevant; a few more environment shots would be good, but there's not a lot of meat to these as far as demonstrating your design sense due to the simplicity, or how it relates to some kind of game function (ie: showing a character doing something in the environment, or showing off some kind of level design thought). Nor are they fleshed out enough to serve as just a demonstration of solid painting skill (always useful), or demonstrating an overall mood or idea that would carry through to the rest of the production- they seem more like studies than portfolio pieces. Looking back to the first page of that .pdf, I know you can do cool environment work that can do all of these things- if you can bring that level of polish and cool design to these environments, that'd be great- but I'm not sure they stand up on their own as portfolio pieces currently, without that extra little bit of TLC.
I Iruka, its been a while. As for updating your portfolio what kind of jobs are you looking for? I have a suggestion, in your concept area, you have some excellent hand painted examples of textures that could be tiling textures for games however they are no usable as that as of now, I would also make 548X548 or 1024x1024 of them as well. I know you can do it becasue of the tiling rocks you have.
1) I need some more coherent series, a narrative about the projects I'm working on and less one off works that don't give a good idea of what my work is like when interacting in a space.
2)While more or less, some of these are good, they all require a presentation upgrade, polishing, and rearranging.
3) Its fairly confusing as to what type of job I could handle.
I do have some flat isometric tiles, and some stuff thats going into our game that is still in a sort of testing phase, I will try to polish them up, and use them as context for some of my work.
(right now its all just super rough stuff like this:
but it could be cleaned up)
1) I need some more coherent series, a narrative about the projects I'm working on
Not...really?
The major thing I'm trying to get across is that you need to present work that is functional, and demonstrates that you know what a modeler (or animator, or engineer) needs to get from you in order to do their job- but this certainly doesn't require you to have written a novel or a design doc explaining a whole fictional world every time you draw something. (If that was required, almost nobody would ever get a job doing concept art- myself certainly included.)
Presenting a broader context of a narrative is only really necessary when it's not obvious that how a piece would fit into a game without further explanation- if you had done, say, a WoW-looking axe, or a realistic looking chair or something along those lines, that doesn't take much imagination for a reviewer to figure out how that could fit into a broader whole. Everyone is familiar with these things and how they work and what they do, they've seen them in games before. (Hell, if someone really wanted to be creatively lazy about their portfolio building, they could probably just go down a list of popular games, just painting out assets that would fit those styles, one by one- as long as the technical ability was there and they demonstrated they knew what the modelers and texture artists needed from them, it would probably be a pretty successful- if somewhat dull- strategy towards getting a job.)
However, a heavily stylized dog thing with a halo of flame and a dripping lava lamp embedded in its forehead- while admittedly very cool- is much harder to figure out how it would fit into an actual game- what does it do? How does it work? So things like that could probably use some further context in showing how it fits into some kind of deliberate art direction or design goal, so it shows that your work is not only cool, but that it can be functional and useful in a production situation. An art directorial choice like the grey coloration on your cowboys is not immediately obvious, and so just a note indicating that it is an art directorial choice would be beneficial.
Doing this doesn't have to be some elaborate world-building exercise- it just has to indicate you have a solid idea of how that idea would fit into a game at a very general level. Less, "The Skyguardians were the last of their kind, infused with the magic of blah blah blah" and more "HERE IS THE LEVEL WHERE THE PLAYER HITS THIS GIANT RED BUTTON", so to speak. Practical stuff. Overthinking a narrative would probably be a waste of your time, at least as far as getting a job is concerned.
Now, not everything you ever put in a portfolio has to be immediately game usable in this way- but my feedback is geared around how to make what you've got demonstrate that, because that's where you're coming up short currently. Everyone already knows you can draw cool shit, now you have to demonstrate you can do the job you are applying for on a practical, nuts and bolts level.
To be honest, that's kinda not working. Its clear to me that if I've been at applying for two years and no one seems to need my skillset, its not a run of bad luck holding me back. I know better than to believe that the universe is just fucking me over, I need to refocus, and get my shit in line.
I think at this point, you need to tailor your portfolio to a specific part of the games industry if thats what you want to do. I mean, it doesn't hurt to have a wide net of skills, but thats how you get promoted. Having one skill and doing it well is how you get a job. So textures/character concept/environment concept/3d character/3d environment. Right now it seems you have been doing a lot of everything, and thats making your portfolio seem too unfocused.
Also, don't be afraid of doing the tropes like the space marine, or the orc. As subject matter is often out of our hands, art directors and artists are often dealt the hand of making cliches interesting again and it would be nice to see how you would deal with that.
Well that's fucking weird. Two years? I'd have you hired in an instant, but then I'm not the head of a games company. Say, have you exclusively tried getting hired by game developers?
I've got a lot of positive responses to my portfolio, and the occasional freelance, but no jobs.
So far, mostly game dev stuff. Going for animation will also require me to refocus my work, mostly towards 2D tools like toon boom and flash, and getting some storyboard stuff into my portfolio. Which would be more time consuming than just polishing up some concept stuff.
I've been mostly applying to smaller companies where I was hoping that a slightly wider net of skills would be a huge plus, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
I mean, thats not wrong, having a wide set of skills is good for sure, but they want those as bonuses to the thing you do really well.
Your portfolio is more coming off as 'jack of all trades, master of none' than them getting someone who is really good at concepts and then hey look they can also do textures! I think you are selling yourself short because I think if you focused a bit more you would very quickly become a huge asset at almost any game company that likes good art.
I really don't have much to add beyond what Wasser and Bacon have suggested. In regards to polish - a lot of your work has a loose/brushy kind of quality to it...which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you definitely want to also show that you can push things a bit further so they looked finished and final.
Also - getting a job at a studio is haaaard. I applied for a long time too, without success. It's harder to prove to HR departments that you've got the skills if you don't have any industry experience under your belt. That completely changed for me after having worked at 38, but that was also due in part to the fact that, I think, we went down in flames and fireworks and craziness. But don't let the lack of replies get you down too much! I honestly think that's pretty standard. It can take awhile to get your foot in the door. If you keep working at it and improving (and networking!), you're bound to get something in the future.
Also-also, this year has been horribad for the industry. Layoffs and closings everywhere. So the competition might be fiercer than usual.
Posts
Edit: Editing out some unneeded images for bandwith
I like your new trio of wolves!
Also, I'm not usually a fan of wood panels, but hot dang!!!
INSTAGRAM
I agree it all looks so great..... however, Iruka, did you stop drawing girls in dragon suit ?
Arden, I dont plan on animating the pattern at all, I was thinking of doing a rippling lava sort of pattern though. As for funny comics, I have thought about starting a funny comic tumblr, but I would be in a sea of many.
Fug,
Fantomas, My avatar is still the same, though the suit is a much less literal hoodie now, and I seem to draw myself way less.
What does it matter how many others do it if yours is better?
If I set an artificial deadline, like, 3 months, for a small preview of my comic and its universe, would a few people on the forums be willing to hold me to that deadline?
Everything Iruka colors reminds me of melted icecream, so I can totally see where you're coming from.
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
please continue to be awesome
(three months from now also works)
Doing a Minecraft texture pack would be fun, though.
I made a sketch for this 3 months ago but just got to it. Decided I would relax and paint something that wasn't for anything, so crazy dogs came out. I need to do some sketchbook scanning as well.
Tumblr | Twitter | Twitch | Pinny Arcade Lanyard
[3DS] 3394-3901-4002 | [Xbox/Steam] Redfield85
FIRST GO TO MY WEBSITE>>>>>http://lauramakesart.com/
then
SECOND DOWNLOAD THIS PDF>>>>>>http://lauramakesart.com/LauraWilson_portfolio1.pdf
Its pretty small, really.
Look at all the shit on there and assess if you were going to give me a job. Right now, there's not enough that directly applies to the industry. I need to clean up my portfolio and re design the sections to better present myself as a creative thinker.
I'm picking through some old work to maybe improve upon, or just add, as is, to the portfolio. Help me by making the following choices:
Iruka! I think you should:
- Improve/touch up the following works and add them:(list numbers)
- Add the following works to your portfolio as is, they are fine already:(list numbers)
- I think you need a work like this in your portfolio, but you need to start from scratch:(numbers)
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
10)
11)
I would also appreciate:
1) Crits on the site
2) Questions and suggestions about my progress overall
3) Suggestions for assignments for myself.
For now, I'm looking at 2D artist and concept art positions, I know they are the rarest of them, but they are where I'd be the most happy. I will also start building up a little more storyboarding/animation stuff soon.
Iruka! I think you should:
have a resume somewhere- if you don't want name/#/address out there, at least do a highlight reel of where you school'd and what you've work'd.
- Improve/touch up the following works and add them: 6
- Add the following works to your portfolio as is, they are fine already: 1/2
- I think you need a work like this in your portfolio, but you need to start from scratch: 3/4, 11
Those cowpokes are pretty busy, visually speaking. I feel like there are too many ideas being explored in each one to really see them as "Here's six versions of the same guy." There's also some general feature overload going on; the colors aren't always enhancing the defining attributes of the character.
In terms of jobget, The current portfolio stuff looks super mobile-appy. Your general stylistic approach to things gets me very stuck in the neighborhood of these:
X
X
X
X
and superduper X.
Basically as an art director or somesuch I know that playful, saturated, bright and punchy cartoony graphics have done well on mobile platforms and are likely to continue being very attached to that sector, and that's what I'm seeing from you.
There's a distinct lack of people in your showcase work, which is not to say character design so much as just figures and less stylized renderings. With what you have displayed right now, I would hire you, but not for work that involved the cool animated characters I'm pretty sure you'd love to be doing. I might pay you to make a really cool set of shapes for my match-3 iOS game (See textureballs / Elemental game linked above), and draw an almanac of cool unlocks and abilities you gain as you progress in the game (. The environments and textures/plants would give me confidence that you could do a cool splash screen or background for said puzzler, but I would probably leave the talking heads / character art to someone else.
3DS: 0447-9966-6178
Thanks so much dude.
I totally agree with all your points. I was originally curving my portfolio pretty hard to mobile, because that's where the freelance seems to be. So far, Mobile companies tend to be a bit unstable/indecisive and the freelance can dry up pretty fast, though, so I really want to rework my range.
You are also right about the lack of people. I will have to fix that, for sure.
Oh! and just to be a total pain in the ass @angelofbacon @nightdragon @Wassermelone @DMAC @Prox @Kochi,
LOOKING AT YOU GUYS SO HARD RIGHT NOW
- Improve/touch up the following works and add them: 1+2 (combine them in to one), 9
- Add the following works to your portfolio as is, they are fine already: 5
- I think you need a work like this in your portfolio, but you need to start from scratch: 11
Pieces 1 and 2 are really great, but they'd be even better I think if you could show them in the context of a environment.
Your website says a lot about your art, but it doesn't say all that much about you. Also the contact information should be more than a tiny grey piece of text in the footer.
Your PDF lacks a grid structure, and it feels a little like things are just slapped on the page wherever. It's not terrible, but it could look better if you figured out a system of organisation.
6 to 9 of the pieces you posted are some of the most interesting in your portfolio, not because they're your best work but because they show your thinking and working process. You could try putting some annotations alongside them to show which decisions you made and why, every employer I've spoken to in the design industry at least has said that stuff is really valuable to them.
(I apologize for the length, it may be a little overwhelming- I just went through the whole thing top to bottom without really editing. I also didn't edit for "hey here is what's realistic to accomplish in X amount of time"- I don't know what your timeframe is or how long it takes you to do these things, so I'm just throwing out everything that occurs to me, and letting you use your discretion about what feedback you feel you can use. Sorry if it's too much, I don't mean to take the wind out of your sails here.)
You already pretty much got at the big thing I'm going to say here, which is the applicability of a lot of the work you've got going on isn't as strong as it could be. It's all really cool stuff, but some polish and focus here and there will make it seem a lot less art studenty and a lot more, "yes, I can plop this person down in our art department today and feel that they'll be able to produce the work that we need right away." The technical art skills aren't in question here- you've definitely got what it takes, in my estimation- just the ability to present yourself as someone with relevant knowledge on the production side of things.
Going through these 1 at a time-
Website:
Stand by the same thing I said a year ago. Melting birds should be axed, reduced in number, or consolidated- it may be fun stuff to look at and draw, but it doesn't really demonstrate how your work applies to game work. Ditto for cloud headed guy. Wolf faced guy may or may not freak out art directors easily scared of furries (might be able to diffuse that concern by supplementing it with a full-body shot/turnarounds/etc. establishing it more as a character design model sheet.)
Also yes, it needs a resume- or at least some acknowledgement of your schooling. I don't care about that, and an art director who knows anything probably won't care, but it may mean something to an HR droid who likely doesn't know any better, and they may be the gate that keeps you from your portfolio making it to an art director.
.PDF:
Might want to add your name and some info to each page using a consistent layout- a bar on the the bottom or something. If someone prints this out when going through portfolio candidates it's good to reinforce your name and make sure people can figure out who did the art if the pages get scattered to the winds.
The first page (with the trees and the junk yard) is really strong. Stuff broken out into discrete assets, it's fun to look at and professional. Wish there was more stuff like this- stuff that is directly game applicable. Especially nice for mobile work.
Second page is really nice, but it would be nice if there were a few more items, or some indication of how these items would apply to a game- if they are meant to be icons, reduce them down to icon size, or show what the rollover state would be, or however they work.
Third page- it's all nice work, but the balls and the skin texture things do appear to be more personal or school study exercises than something that necessarily belongs in a portfolio. Better to use the lessons learned on a real concept.
The textures are pretty nice, but if you're doing texture work in a portfolio you'll probably want to have A) more examples and
Fourth page- dog and cat would need more explanation on how these concepts actually would be used in a game. Is it for a 3d game? Turnarounds or a 3/4 read view would help. Also making sure you have a version that's close to a bind pose than these posed version would be useful; as a concept artist doing model packets, your job is to communicate to the modelers what they need to know- right now I don't know what these guys would look like standing up, or how I would model them so they could animate, so they could be rigged.
Teal dog is good. Not sure if you need the pencil sketch, since it's largely redundant with the color one- if there's information you're trying to get across (ie: relevance of the eyes being back vs forward), isolate the head and note what the relevance is ("ie: When dog is in Blaragara Mode, ears are swept back"). Other sketches are the start of a good idea, but not given enough detail to be properly impressive in a portfolio. Make them bigger and detail them out, they'll be good.
This page should probably be 2 or 3 pages instead of 1: one for the teal dog and 1 or 2 for the cartoony cat and dog, depending on how much elaboration you add to them.
Fifth page- Card is a cool illustration, but it would probably work better if you had a series of them, along with card back design and maybe a pack design as well- something that can be presented as a cohesive asset set, rather than a standalone illustration which may not relate to game work.
You and the monster is cool, but it feels more like an "inspiring" concept piece than a "make this asset" piece- so it would probably benefit from having a background to flesh out the world these characters live in, rather than cropped against plain white. It's quite visually arresting, so I'd imagine someone going through your portfolio or interviewing you would have some questions on what's going on here, what the context is- a little big more fleshing out with an environment would make a convincing argument that this isn't just a weird, cool thing (which isn't that useful by itself) and is in fact a weird, cool, cohesive and well-thought out thing (which is very useful.)
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1+2) Flowers are cool- might want to polish up the green branch holding up the one plant, looks a but lazy just being flat. Reduce the size or ax the sketch on the far right of #2, it looks a lot less finished than the others. Red pod plan on the bottom doesn't seem as finished as the others, could use some polishing. If you have an enviroment BG these belong to, it would be good to show at a small example of how these fit into the the broader scheme of things.
3+4) I know I saw these awhile back and gave them the thumbs up, but Moly's talk about busyness jostled my brain a bit, so now I've got a concern about them. Were these to be concepts for a game, what kind of game? 2d sprites? Flash? 3d? They're quite detailed to the point where they would be difficult to animate in Flash (if that was the intention, an example of a vectorized version would be in order, with a few frames of animation preferable, showing how those tendrilly coattails work), but you haven't given a clear example of how one of these characters would translate into a fully realized 3d model.
Is the single color/grey something that would be carried over into the final model? Or is that just something used for this iterative design phase? How would this color palette work with the environment of a game? Would the backgrounds be greyed out as well? (You don't necessarily need to draw out a envrio concept for these guys (though it would be nice), but having an answer would be nice. Even just some notes that were like, (The Gragerblagger Gang is identified by teal trim in their costumes) or some such would help it establish these characters as part of a cohesive whole, art direction-wise. Also, a more finished version of one or two of these characters given their own separate page would be helpful- front and back views and detail shots/sketches of areas that may be unclear to modelers (What's underneath this poncho, do you actually see this guy's eyes or what, how does that sword work exactly, etc.)
5) Covered that in .pdf
6-9) Cool. Might want a color back and a side view of the turnaround, though. Also it's not entirely clear that 8+9 are the same character, so a quick x-ray type sketch showing how the legs fit into the funky pants of 9 might be in order. Definitely more like this if you want to do 3d character design.
10) Covered that in .pdf
11) These might be ok for comps for a painting, but they don't seem to have much going on that makes them game relevant; a few more environment shots would be good, but there's not a lot of meat to these as far as demonstrating your design sense due to the simplicity, or how it relates to some kind of game function (ie: showing a character doing something in the environment, or showing off some kind of level design thought). Nor are they fleshed out enough to serve as just a demonstration of solid painting skill (always useful), or demonstrating an overall mood or idea that would carry through to the rest of the production- they seem more like studies than portfolio pieces. Looking back to the first page of that .pdf, I know you can do cool environment work that can do all of these things- if you can bring that level of polish and cool design to these environments, that'd be great- but I'm not sure they stand up on their own as portfolio pieces currently, without that extra little bit of TLC.
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http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?261761-RJbonner-2d-3d-Artist
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78501
1) I need some more coherent series, a narrative about the projects I'm working on and less one off works that don't give a good idea of what my work is like when interacting in a space.
2)While more or less, some of these are good, they all require a presentation upgrade, polishing, and rearranging.
3) Its fairly confusing as to what type of job I could handle.
I do have some flat isometric tiles, and some stuff thats going into our game that is still in a sort of testing phase, I will try to polish them up, and use them as context for some of my work.
(right now its all just super rough stuff like this:
but it could be cleaned up)
Not...really?
The major thing I'm trying to get across is that you need to present work that is functional, and demonstrates that you know what a modeler (or animator, or engineer) needs to get from you in order to do their job- but this certainly doesn't require you to have written a novel or a design doc explaining a whole fictional world every time you draw something. (If that was required, almost nobody would ever get a job doing concept art- myself certainly included.)
Presenting a broader context of a narrative is only really necessary when it's not obvious that how a piece would fit into a game without further explanation- if you had done, say, a WoW-looking axe, or a realistic looking chair or something along those lines, that doesn't take much imagination for a reviewer to figure out how that could fit into a broader whole. Everyone is familiar with these things and how they work and what they do, they've seen them in games before. (Hell, if someone really wanted to be creatively lazy about their portfolio building, they could probably just go down a list of popular games, just painting out assets that would fit those styles, one by one- as long as the technical ability was there and they demonstrated they knew what the modelers and texture artists needed from them, it would probably be a pretty successful- if somewhat dull- strategy towards getting a job.)
However, a heavily stylized dog thing with a halo of flame and a dripping lava lamp embedded in its forehead- while admittedly very cool- is much harder to figure out how it would fit into an actual game- what does it do? How does it work? So things like that could probably use some further context in showing how it fits into some kind of deliberate art direction or design goal, so it shows that your work is not only cool, but that it can be functional and useful in a production situation. An art directorial choice like the grey coloration on your cowboys is not immediately obvious, and so just a note indicating that it is an art directorial choice would be beneficial.
Doing this doesn't have to be some elaborate world-building exercise- it just has to indicate you have a solid idea of how that idea would fit into a game at a very general level. Less, "The Skyguardians were the last of their kind, infused with the magic of blah blah blah" and more "HERE IS THE LEVEL WHERE THE PLAYER HITS THIS GIANT RED BUTTON", so to speak. Practical stuff. Overthinking a narrative would probably be a waste of your time, at least as far as getting a job is concerned.
Now, not everything you ever put in a portfolio has to be immediately game usable in this way- but my feedback is geared around how to make what you've got demonstrate that, because that's where you're coming up short currently. Everyone already knows you can draw cool shit, now you have to demonstrate you can do the job you are applying for on a practical, nuts and bolts level.
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Carry on then.
:oops:
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Your later points are still valid, of course.
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To be honest, that's kinda not working. Its clear to me that if I've been at applying for two years and no one seems to need my skillset, its not a run of bad luck holding me back. I know better than to believe that the universe is just fucking me over, I need to refocus, and get my shit in line.
I think at this point, you need to tailor your portfolio to a specific part of the games industry if thats what you want to do. I mean, it doesn't hurt to have a wide net of skills, but thats how you get promoted. Having one skill and doing it well is how you get a job. So textures/character concept/environment concept/3d character/3d environment. Right now it seems you have been doing a lot of everything, and thats making your portfolio seem too unfocused.
Also, don't be afraid of doing the tropes like the space marine, or the orc. As subject matter is often out of our hands, art directors and artists are often dealt the hand of making cliches interesting again and it would be nice to see how you would deal with that.
So far, mostly game dev stuff. Going for animation will also require me to refocus my work, mostly towards 2D tools like toon boom and flash, and getting some storyboard stuff into my portfolio. Which would be more time consuming than just polishing up some concept stuff.
I've been mostly applying to smaller companies where I was hoping that a slightly wider net of skills would be a huge plus, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
Your portfolio is more coming off as 'jack of all trades, master of none' than them getting someone who is really good at concepts and then hey look they can also do textures! I think you are selling yourself short because I think if you focused a bit more you would very quickly become a huge asset at almost any game company that likes good art.
Also - getting a job at a studio is haaaard. I applied for a long time too, without success. It's harder to prove to HR departments that you've got the skills if you don't have any industry experience under your belt. That completely changed for me after having worked at 38, but that was also due in part to the fact that, I think, we went down in flames and fireworks and craziness. But don't let the lack of replies get you down too much! I honestly think that's pretty standard. It can take awhile to get your foot in the door. If you keep working at it and improving (and networking!), you're bound to get something in the future.
Also-also, this year has been horribad for the industry. Layoffs and closings everywhere. So the competition might be fiercer than usual.