I’m looking for any tips or advice on building up an art portfolio to get into a good art school. Majoring in either: illustration, animation, graphic design or creative writing. What are art schools looking for and what don’t they won’t to see?
What is best to have in an art portfolio?
02
Mar
Benjamin
March 2, 2010 at 1:23 am
the only art portfolio i’m familiar with has nothing but art in it… Unless you’re trying to aim this portfolio as marketing for yourself. Then maybe a biography, and only your best work that relates to what you are marketing. In general, and in art school… All our portfolios had were our art.. lol If you’re art is sculpting, then take pictures
Art Newbie Bill
March 2, 2010 at 1:53 am
The Academy of Art University San Francisco is a respected, fully accredited West Coast school. They don’t care about your portfolio when entering. They took me and I had never picked up a pencil. The school basically tells you that you don’t need a portfolio to enter but they will not graduate you unless you have one when it is time to leave. Basically if you have a HS diploma, and tuition money you can enter. It is staying in that is the hard part. The failure rate is high because a lot of people enter without really knowing what they want and without wanting to work for it. A good school is not going to let you slap something down and call it art. My suggestion to you is to work on the basics. The stronger your basics the better. And next you have to commit yourself to working hard and practice self-driven work now. Everything from doing chores to homework now is just practice on forcing yourself to push through quality consistant work. When choosing a school look for full accreditation. There are a lot of tradeschool mills where the credits will not transfer. Stay away from those. Look for a school that will force you to learn the classics of art first as a foundation. Also look for the places that hire students. Pixar & Disney for example recruit from my school. Find out who is hiring students from these schools. Do they have internships with major companies etc? Also look at the art coming from the students in the school. My school for example has a gallery of student work that is updated each semester with all new art. If you don’t like the art coming out of the school or if their example works are stale and never change then beware. See the links for both the school and my deviant art page to get a feel for what I have learned with no prior experience in 5 classes.
Julie C
March 2, 2010 at 2:41 am
An art portfolio can be in two forms, usually the one that you will send to a collage will have:
1. Slides (20) of your recent work projects (if you are in high school the ones from your art classes will be fine) in a slide sheet labeled on the slide which side is up and the # of the slide with sharpie.
OR
20 jpegs on a cd
2. Slide list- make a list of those slides, number 1-20 and write, medium, year, title and maybe a sentence about it.
3. An artist statement- wow them with one paragraph about why you like art, what you think about while you do art, and where you see yourself in the future
4. If you have been in the local paper or gotten any awards for your art photocopy those and put them in there
Take all this stuff and put them in a nice folder! You are ready to apply to schools or in the future galleries, too!
Different schools want different things, most schools want diversity in your portfolio. They do not care how well you can replicate life in drawings, they want to know that you are a creative person.
lazydazy
March 2, 2010 at 3:28 am
Yeah. The biggest mistake a lot of art students do is not having exactly what the school requests you to have in your portolio.
Get the brochures of the schools you’re interested in or go online to their website. They will have details of what to submit for each major under their “submissions” page.
You can give them more samples, but don’t send in less than they ask for. If they ask for 3 samples of package design, don’t give them 2 samples and a drawing of a cat. They want to see that you can follow instruction.
I say this because I’ve know some very talented people who didn’t get into a school right away because they didn’t submit the proper art.