3PP 29 Curating Your Portfolio

New class that launches this month!

Gina Lee’s Art Licensing Class: Part 2. She has artwork that she is still making money from, thousands of dollars, that she made in college, that is getting printed on bags, shower curtains, etc. If you want to learn how to do that, check that out at SVSLearn.com!

Because Will has his Youtube Channel, does this podcast, and teaches for SVS Learn, he often gets asked a lot to give people portfolio reviews.

Handout: A list of 100+ things to include in your children’s book portfolio, at the bottom of the show notes.

Portfolio Reviews

The main thing that Will will ask people when giving them a portfolio review is: “What type of work do you want to get?”

And he will normally get one of two responses:
I don’t know, I just want to work as an artist in some illustration market.
More specific: I want to do [comics, children’s books, graphic novels, or animation.]

Advice for people who don’t know: if you don’t know what market you want to go into, then there is no way you can make a portfolio that will please an art director and make them want to hire you. Art directors are pretty literal.

If you think that you are good at rendering, then you may think that you could draw anything well, and that the art director will recognize that because you showed your rendering prowess. That is not the case, you have to show it!

It really is so specific. Whatever you show, literally, that’s the thing you will be asked to do.

If you have a couple of illustrations with chickens in them, then you may become known as the chicken guy!

You as an artist know that if you can draw a human figure well, then you can draw just about anything. But that’s not how art directors see it. Art director’s have to protect their reputation. This is their career and they want to be well known and respected, and someday become creative directors. They don’t want a curveball. They will usually go for the sure bet.

You Need a Business Plan

Lee often asks the same question as Will: “What type of work do you want to get?”

That question says: How are you going to be in business? It drives the image and everything else: who the market is? how the market pays? how you get paid? how many illustrations you have to do in a month? how images are licensed? how the pay structure works? do you know how the business works and which direction you want to go in this business? Etc. This is important stuff to research and know ahead of time.

So essentially, when asking, “What type of work do you want to get?” We are asking, “What’s your business plan?”

This is a business and you need to have a business plan.

If you are at the point where you are trying to get work, it is vital that you understand this.

For example: You need to be able to say, “I’m going to work in editorial illustration, focused on these markets..., I want to work with these magazines…., and this is the type of work that they are doing.. Here’s my work and how it fits in there...” And then as a critiquer, we could tell you, “I would recommend, you take these 4 images and make them into post card mailers and send them out, and then alternate them monthly with this email marketing plan…”

The more focused and specific you are, the better advice and critique you will be able to receive.

A business plan is an evaluation of the current market and your particular direction.

Who’s getting work right now? Where is the majority of the work being hired? Are the rates going up or down? Who are your main competitors? What do you have that they don’t have? What’s your competitive advantage? What will help you get hired instead of them?

You need to be able to answer those questions. This is a very smart, logical way to approach your work.

To the person who says,“I don’t know what I want to do, I just want to work somewhere.”: You can always change it, but you will be treading water if you don’t have a plan. You need to have a definite plan.

So let’s get rid of the art side of this for a minute. Let’s say you have a $100,000 and your friend has a business plan that they want to pitch you. So you go and meet them at a cafe and say, “Okay, pitch me your idea.” They say, “I want to open a pizza place.” You say, “I’ve got $100,000 that I could invest in your place. Okay, where’s it going to be? How are you going to compete? What’s your secret?” “Oh, I don’t know.” “How much is it going to cost?” “Oh, I don’t know.” “What materials are you going to need? What’s your advertising plan?”? “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t have an advertising plan.” Would you give that person $100,000?

With what we are talking about it’s even worse: “I want to open a restaurant.” “Okay, what kind?” “I don’t know.” We have got to be smarter than that.

Artists do that, here is most artist’s 3 Step Business Plan: 1. Make an image, 2. Post image, 3. Sit back and pray that something happens and that they get hired. We’re only half joking.

Any other business would die with that model. They have to know their product and their customer.

We do have a product. With art, sometimes we get too attached to it, and it is really personal. People can get so personally attached to their work. However, ultimately if you want to make an income from it, it is a product and you have to look at it as such, as a product. That’s what it is and you need to think about, “how much it’s worth, where it’s bought and sold, etc.”

There’s nothing wrong with making art but you aren’t going to make a living at it.

If you just want to make art for the sake of making art, or just for fun, that’s totally fine and good, but you aren’t going to make a living with it.

To The Person Who Wants to Do Everything

Sometimes Will still gets the comment, “You keep telling me I need to pick a market to work in, but I just want to work in all of them. I’m just excited, I love comics, I love illustration, I love licensing, I love animation, I just want to get hired anywhere, I don’t care.”

Pick one as your main, and then dabble in the other ones. Then if you see success in one of those other areas then maybe you can start to lean there more.

Pick the one that you know you can actually make some money at and can support yourself in. Nothing else will exist if you can’t support yourself. You need to have some sort of financial engine to support yourself.

It’s like a Venn Diagram, one circle: the thing I’m good at, and the other circle, where there are opportunities. You want those to overlap as much as possible.

For example with concept art, The technical side of it is so difficult, but interest is high, but usually a person’s ability to do it is low, and it is also very, very competitive.

How many musicians are good at all types of music, how many restaurants are good at serving all types of food, how many karate studios teach all types of martial arts?

If you don’t know where you want to go, and you’d be happy anywhere, and art directors won’t hire you based off of your work, then do a focused project to help build your portfolio.

For example, let’s say your subject matter is all over the place, you don’t have any sequential art in your portfolio. However, comics, children’s books, and graphic novels are all based off of sequential art. So you create a project, i.e. write and illustrate a graphic novel, it could be a section or part of a graphic novel or a children’s book. It could be as few as 3-5 pieces of sequential art. Do that 3-4 times with a particular market. And then you have a portfolio that could attract an art director. You can focus on classics like your spin on Little Red Riding Hood, something that’s in the public domain, that the art director will recognize and have an emotional connection pre established with that story.

Make new images for portfolios, no matter where you are in your career.

Do research: i.e. List 5 people or companies that buy this type of work, look at how much these jobs pay, who are the art directors that work at these companies that do this type of job?

I.e. Concept board book, go to Chronicle in San Francisco, would start to look at what they had done in the past and art directors that worked on those projects.

You are in a sense, preempting what you want to do. You are doing research beforehand to tailor what you want to do.

A lot of people do scary stuff but it doesn’t really work for children’s books.

Editor, wants to see if you can carry a character from one page to the next, can you draw kids that are cute and appealing, can you draw different ethnicities and genders, can you demonstrate that you can use a variety of compositions, etc?
So if you show up with a Friday the 13th Portfolio, it won’t be a good fit for children’s books.

Phases of Your Art Career

It takes a long time to develop a portfolio.

Phases of your art career:

Phase 1, “Wow, I can make something look realistic!” Being able to make something look like it is jumping off the page.
Phase 2, “Wow, I’m better than my friends and family, I might be able to do this as a career”
Phase 3, “Wow, I’m even better than some of my art friends.”
Phase 4, “I’m not getting work yet, I need to get some critique.” That’s the stage where a lot of students that come to Will are at.
Phase 5, “Man, I have so much work to do to develop a great portfolio” Start to become humbled because they realize where they are...