game art portfolios

While the basics are the best and most obvious place to start, they are often NOT covered nor discussed. Something in us doesn’t want to ask the obvious questions, we need to dismiss the easy stuff so we look like we know what we’re talking about. But I’d like to bring up the basics and cover them here, because when it comes to portfolios, it doesn’t matter how great your artwork is…you miss these points and you come off looking unprofessional, irrelevant or unplugged.

First of all – If you call yourself an artist, especially a game artist and you’re pitching yourself to game companies you should have an on-line portfolio. If you don’t have a on-line portfolio and you apply to a game studio by sending in a DVD, CD or *gasp* a VHS tape, you’re basically saying that you are way behind the curve, don’t think much of the web or its power to reach millions and don’t consider it too highly as a medium effective enough to carry your artwork…better to leave that to this cheap DVD with “My Demo 2009” scribbled in by a sharpie. Likewise having this DVD paper clipped to your resume does little to impress a hiring manager.

Instead, invest a little time and even less money into a web presence that shows off your artwork in an easy to access, straight forward way. This tells the hiring manager that you do take the web seriously, that you recognize technology and can adapt to it and make it your own.

It’s the first thing I do when I look at an applicant. I pull up their website and review their samples while reading their resume in my hand. There’s a certain flow that anyone charged with looking at hundreds of resumes and demos get’s into, and stopping to open up a DVD, putting it into the drive, waiting until the movie player starts and then getting an error because the movies is compressed with some unknown codex immediately goes into its own separate stack…let’s call this the “sad stack”. See what I mean?