Building a Game Art Portfolio
How to display your work so it hits the right eyeballs
I originally posted this article as a recommendation thread on Twitter in 2022. This is an updated and edited version of that thread.
There are four necessary components for a good portfolio. In order of importance, they are:
- Accessibility
- Contact info
- Quality
- Quantity
Let’s go through the list.
Accessibility
What accessibility means in terms of a portfolio is blasting art in a viewer’s face as quickly and easily as possible.
I’m going to pick on a few artists’ portfolios as good examples of accessibility. Yes, I’m including my own here, and I’ll explain how mine works.
First up is Jason Rainville’s (@rhineville on Twitter) illustration portfolio. As soon as you open it up, you’re greeted with a huge array of large images that take up the whole screen and show extremely quickly the type of work he wants to do.
That’s excellent.
Once you get past the amazing imagery, the secondary reads are the information about him, his contact info, and links to different sections of his portfolio.
Also, since he sells prints, he’s even got a shopping cart on his front page. Fantastic!
Jason’s portfolio is a great example of showing all the information you need up front. It’s highly accessible by showing important info very quickly. This is key when you’re looking for work and need a recruiter’s eyeballs on your stuff.
Next up: Danny Sweeney (@dekubrush on Twitter)
Danny uses Artstation to host his portfolio. This is a good choice because AS has excellent layout and good discoverability.
Danny’s made a point of filling out his general location and job title as well, making hiring easy:
If you’re filling out a portfolio, making sure that a potential recruiter knows your location very quickly is SUPER important. There are always going to be visa issues with international hiring, so having that info at a glance is critical.
Once again, accessibility.
Next: Lauren Walsh (@LaurenWalshArt on Twitter) has a great portfolio for an artist selling illustrations and prints because it shows a gigantic example of her work, and then quickly gets you info at the top about her shop.
Again, up front info quickly.
I’m including my portfolio here because I treat the front page like a combination portfolio and short-form resume.
It has my name, my specialty, and two big projects I’ve worked on as the immediate read.
I’m packing in lots of info in a fairly small space.
Having lots of info available very quickly to a viewer is EXTREMELY important.
A recruiter or hiring manager is going to judge your portfolio very quickly, and part of that judgment is going to involve whether they can tell who you are and what you do immediately.
Contact Info
As a manager looking at portfolios, I’d argue that your contact info is just as important as the content of your portfolio.
There’s not a lot to say here aside from: MAKE IT EASY TO GET IN CONTACT WITH YOU.
MORE CONTACT INFO = BETTER.
This may seem like an extremely obvious thing to say, but judging by some portfolios I’ve seen recently, it’s not?!
Put your email at the top of every page. Hell, put it top and bottom.
Quality
This is the big one, and the thing that has the highest potential to make people bristle when I talk about it.
But quality is a real, quantifiable, measurable thing for gamedev work.
Let me explain how:
On a very high level, if you’re applying with a portfolio that has art which doesn’t match the basic art and technical goals of the project on which you’re trying to work, you’re probably not going to get the job.
Some people aren’t able to hit that bar.
If, for example, you have work that has shading errors, bad topological layout, inefficiencies of various sorts, weird anatomy, or unreadable shapes or shading, you’re simply not hitting publishable art quality.
That sucks, but it’s a fact.
To get a job doing work on a commercial product, you need to be able to hit or exceed the quality bar set by the artists already on the project.
That means if you want to make, for example, Overwatch skins, you’ve got to demonstrate you’re capable of doing it.
If you want to make characters for the next God of War game, you need to demonstrate aptitude with the type of style, materials, anatomy, and various other aspects that go into making God of War. Saying something is “your style” doesn’t cut it. You need to do THEIR style.
Commercial art is about being a technician who specializes in visuals and aesthetics. It’s about dissecting a style and implementing the elements of that style on a new character, object, etc.
If you can’t demonstrate your ability to do that, you will not get the job.
Finally, and absolutely LEAST importantly for a portfolio, is…
Quantity
Two things go into this:
- How many pieces there are in your portfolio
- How many of those pieces are finished work
A portfolio is supposed to show how you can contribute to a given project.
If you’ve made a lot of unfinished things and put them in your portfolio, then all you’re showing is your ability to start something and not finish it.
That doesn’t work in a production environment. You need to be able to show finished pieces.
A portfolio that has two absolutely fantastic finished pieces is going to get you a lot more attention than one with twenty unfinished sculpts of blob monsters. Finishing something means you know all the stages of development.
A finished product shows a hiring manager that you can follow through on the promises of an initial sketch. So, rather than showing a LOT of stuff, start getting ruthless with your work and cut out all the stuff that’s not finished.
Cut your work down to the bone.
Take out all the unfinished or unpolished work.
Take out the things that are half a decade old.
Remove anything you’re even slightly unsure of.
Take out your student work and show stuff you finished for a client.
If this only leaves you with one or two great pieces and the rest is cut out, that’s good. That shows good judgment. That shows a recruiter or hiring manager your have good taste and know yourself well enough to keep your portfolio strong.
Now, go forth and update your portfolios. Please. I’ve seen too many bad ones.
