Portfolio Critique please?
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@christopherh Well, I'm not exactly pro, but I'll give you my thoughts, and you can take them or leave them.
I think you have a fun way of stylizing humans and animals that could work really well in a children's book. You've definitely developed some drawing skill, but there are a few things I feel could be improved to really look "pro". One thing that jumps out at me is what I would call "predictable colors". Grass is green. Sky is blue. Dog is brown. I don't feel like you really carefully thought out and chose the colors from a story telling stand point, rather just chose the right crayon from the coloring box--this says "grass green" so thats what I'll use. (Of course, this could just be my preference for a more muted palette speaking, so take it or leave it.) Maybe try doing a few color comps on your thumbnail before jumping to final, see if you come up with something more interesting.
Also, for a childrens book portfolio, I think it would be great if it included more... children. One of those obvious things that you don't think of til someone says it ;-). This is something I've been working on as well, so it's not just you.
Just my two cents. I hope this is helpful :-).
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Most of the hacks I deal with are with third party modules that are installed. They tend to leave a backdoor into your site. Be careful on what you install. But @Jazeps-Tenis is on point 110% with everything said.
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@sarah-luann Thank you for the critique! I hadn’t even realized that the four pieces I recently removed contained all of the children in my portfolio
It just didn’t even occur to me!
As for the palette, I will really take a look at this. My favorite artists all use limited palettes and darker colors... the first that springs to mind is Jon Klassen... so I don’t know why I haven’t adopted this in my own stuff when that is what I like to see myself.
Definitely some food for thought, thank you! -
I think the best critiques are the most straight forward. I don’t know if I should be as straight forward as I want, but you seem to really want to know what is wrong, so I am just going to say what I think. Please understand that I am mainly focusing on what I see as flaws, and not really focusing on your strengths as much, just because I think as you get better in areas that you might agree need work, your stronger areas will get even better, and I also don’t want to have to figure out how to balance the critique and possibly confuse you as to what needs work or not. Just a disclaimer, I am not a pro, I am just an arrogant psuedo intellectual, but I am going to try my best.
As for your designing:
All of your pieces that are full images are perfectly horizontal. Design wise they feel boring for that reason. It is like the veiwer has a perfect seat in each piece, and your goal should be to make the viewer not relevent to the scene outside of creating focus . Go to pinterest and look up Dan Santat’s illustration and notice how almost all of his work is tilted. What I do is create a page of thumbnails, and look up a single artist and fill the the entire page with thumbnails of their art. I also think you need to get more “stuff” in your images. I want to see chairs, objects half off the page and darker objects in the foreground. Use the foreground and related objects to the piece to be an excuse to do less work. A big ass chair taking up 25% of your image is less work than not having it in there at all. get used to using those items as ways to create overlapping in your design phase as well. Overlapping creates interest, but also not overlapping makes the image seem unnatural. Take notice of how much overlapping is going on in Will Terry’s work on Pinterest. Also, you should have many more full pieces. Any agent or art director needs to know you can handle a 32 page picture book with full spreads.
I actually really like the Sherlock Homes scenes, though I have no clue why the Arab character is vanishing from the scene. Besides that, I notice that your 2D style is much more polished than the 3D environments are, which I completely understand, since I had the same issue when I started here.
Your rendering needs work. The water needs to look like water, and just because the trees are in the background and require less rendering doesn’t mean we can get away with less effort. What should distinguish the foreground from the background is more so values, not so much less rendering, though that is true to some extent. For example, I will drawl all of my buildings with the same care and effort, and then create a layer and merely lightely fade out the ones further back a bit, causing slight destortion.
Try some mixed media. Maybe throw in some different textures, and practice rendering images with more chaos in your pieces. Right now your images look 100% digital, and that is a major turn off in this industry. Your goal is to get people to have to ask if it is digital or traditional. Check out Will Terry’s videos on mixed media and drawing on the ipad. You will see how much he works at making it look less digital.
With that said, I think you have a lot of great qualities, and I wouldn’t have wasted my time unless I thought you had enough skill to push through to achieve your goals. Again, I am not a pro, and I have had some critiques that I thought were off and I was right. Someone told me my entire portfolio was trash and the folliwing weekend two art directors from Penguin were telling me how much they loved it. So, consider what I said, but also note that I am not infallible.
P.s don’t hate me
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@eric-castleman Thank you so much for taking the time to give such an in-depth critique. You made a lot of really good points, and yeah, I would much rather have the honesty when it is given constructively like you did... I want to improve and it is finding out my flaws that will help me to do that.
I have a lot to be working on, that’s for sure. I think because I have come from a background of such a different style of illustrating that this is a very steep learning curve. But, learning is what I am here to do.
With more thought in the design stage I think that picking more dynamic poses and angles will become easier but I think my biggest challenge is with rendering and textures. I still find it difficult when working digitally to decide on which brushes to use and how to work with texture more naturally.
Thanks again! -
@christopherh I'm going to add a few things
if I were a client:
- you can share a real photo of you that would help a lot. Some even share photos and videos of themselves working on their computers or desks.
- I don't know what are the services you offer, their estimated prices or how to work with you.
- Also some testimonials from people you worked with, learned from or who have something nice to say about your work/you.
as for the art:
- try to show you can be consistent. create 3 illustrations in the same style for example.
- focus on improving your core and cast shadows.
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Hello!
I like your sloth image.In case it's helpful, it's unclear to me what differentiation there is between your "portfolio" and the "sketchbook" category.
Best wishes
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I think @eric-castleman did an awesome critique. He is hitting some really great point, and if you work on that, you'll definitely be a step closer to professional work (although the definition of professional work varies greatly and some aspect of you work is already professional.)
I think the main problem with your work is composition. Once again, Eric gave some great tip and I don't want to repeat what he said, but I definitely think you should try his trick of doing thumbnail of other artist work to study their compositions (this is a great tip, I will also try it the next time I feel stuck with a composition). You should also watch Will's "creative composition" class, one of the best class on SVS in my opinion.
I like the pieces with sherlock, the style is very nice, and it shows that you can have a consistant style. I also like the character designs. BUT right now the fact that you have these 3 illustrations is probably actually detrimental to your portfolio, because it's basically the same composition repeated 3 times. I think an art director would see that and maybe jump to the conclusion that you can't draw various perspectives and camera angles so you resort to the same POV for all your images.
Anyway! Like Eric, I believe in real critiques, so I hope you won't think this is too harsh! I think you're heading in the right direction
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@Eric-Castleman did an excellent and on point critique, to which there is little to add. I would say on my part that, if you are seeking work in the children's book field, you probably need to enrich your portfolio considerably with the type of images that are relevant for children's books. There is a short course (1 or 2 hours) here on SVS about "what to put in a children's book portfolio" that is very enlightening.
If you browse through some books - maybe picking some whose style and tone is similar to yours - you can have a sense of what type of content is relevant for that market. Many of your pieces are more character studies than illustrations (for example the last 4) and the narrative content is either absent or very limited.
The three Sherlock Holmes illustrations are the best in that sense but, as it has been pointed out, I would keep only the best of the three and drop the other two. They are too similar to be all included, and an AD may interpret that as a lack of skills in creating different moods and points of view in a narrative sequence.
There's a nice sense of style consistency that you can expand on. You are using a few "formulas" (like the round ball-shaped eyes and the big noses coming straight from the forehead) that you can either use consistently on all your pieces (being aware of their potential and limitations) or not at all. At the moment you have them in about 3/4 of your pieces and then there are some deviations. That makes it look a bit unpredictable.
I'm not sure what the purpose of the "sketch" section is, as it is not WIPs and it is not really "sketches" - it looks very similar to the "portfolio" section and I'm not sure it adds anything.
Overall you're on a good path - just a few more steps to go! -
@christopherh I think I like the 2D spot illustrations the best. Interestingly, the bird is the piece that looked the most "finished" to me. He is great and I think my kids would agree.
What I would say is that many of the other pieces seem to sort of argue with themselves about that they want to be. It seems like you are very suited at this point for the simple, fun, 2D illustration - along the lines of Lauren Child or Mo Willems. Which, my kids LOVE. (Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, and Gerald and Piggy are some of their all time favorites.) Mo Willem's style works, because he focuses on these very funny, simple characters and not so much on environment or complicated compositions. What's confusing is when you take that kind of flat, symbolic, style of character drawing and put it in a complex setting where it looks like things are starting to have more rendering and dimension. The Tin Man piece, for example, looks unfinished because it has a level of detail that's not quite 3D and also isn't that more flat style. If the character is built with simple, easy to read line work that is not overly complicated, I think its confusing to see individual blades of grass at his feet... Does that make sense? I recommend doing Lee White's class on how to find your style. It's really helpful for getting you moving along your own path toward the style you are interested in aiming at. And you can channel that into these things. And it helps you to make consistent choices throughout the illustration - from character to environment, composition, rendering...
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@christopherh After looking at your site, I had a question. The sloth in outer space and “Pigeon Pete” seem like much more confident and developed pieces with a definitive style that I’m not seeing in the other pieces you have in your portfolio. Are those pieces newer than the rest, or perhaps did you simply spend more time on them? If I were you I’d make those pieces the bar of comparison and make sure that each piece you post could be favorably compared to them, being as good or better than as you grow, and remove the less complex pieces as you can. To that same point, if I were looking to hire someone and saw your site, I would have difficulty knowing whether you’d give me texturey colorful sloth style or the more basic “grass is green, sky is blue” airbrushed style that others have already commented on in this thread. Thanks for sharing your site, hope this helps.
