An art portfolio review can be nerve-wracking, terrifying, and painful. It can also be an incredible experience that will teach you a lifetime of lessons that you’ll bring with you into the studio. To prepare you for your first art portfolio review, let’s pretend I’m reviewing your art portfolio in person at a Portfolio Day event.
What to Bring to Your Art Portfolio Review
I’ll start by asking you to take out your work – all your work, every single piece you brought. Try to bring a minimum of 20 pieces of work. It’s a good idea to bring a little bit of everything you make. Don’t edit out too much.
Leave in-progress work at home. You may think you’re ready for a critique on it, but whoever is reviewing those pieces may critique them as though they’re complete. This can steer the conversation in a way that may not be helpful for meeting your goals.
Some high school art teachers get very involved in helping their students prepare for an art portfolio review. Some parents do too. It’s great for them to help, but this help can also make it easy for you to rely too much on their opinions.
A Quick Note for Parents and Teachers
Don’t give general instructions for portfolio preparation. Every school has unique instructions and they want to get a sense of your student.
The work your students bring shouldn’t be a finished edited portfolio. It should be a bigger collection of work, usually 30-40 pieces that the portfolio reviewer can help them edit.
How I Review an Art Portfolio
- Sketchbooks
- Art Portfolio Presentation
- Art Portfolio Review Questions
- Art Portfolio Examples
- Art Portfolio Inspiration
Sketchbooks
I love to see sketchbooks because they help me understand how you think visually. Sketchbooks show me:
- What topics and ideas you’re most interested in
- What kinds of images and references you collect
- How those references come into your work
I know this sounds like a lot and you might not have that much work. But I want to set expectations. There are absolutely students that you’ll be in art school with that are creating that much work in high school. I have met hundreds of them.
Art Portfolio Presentation
Next, I like to look slowly at every piece. I prefer not to hear your presentation or explanation while I’m looking at the work for the first time.
Why? Because this is a chance for me to give you two different interpretations of your work. The first is a cold read. I get this by looking at the story your work tells me without your interruption.
You won’t be there to explain when the school you’re applying to reviews your portfolio for admission. So, it’s good for you to hear quick impressions and comments. Those are what come up during admission and scholarship portfolio reviews.
Read more: How To Build an Art Portfolio for College in 8 Easy Steps
Next, I’ll give you a second read, after hearing from you about what you’d like to share, and what you want me to see.
Another Note About Explaining Your Artwork
I know that many teachers and blogs recommend having an elevator pitch about your work. For me, explanations about media and processes are usually annoying. Your work tells me the media you’re using and how you’re approaching it.
Those details don’t matter as much as the work itself unless you’re doing something really unusual or inventive. For example, painting with fruit juice from your parents’ fruit farm.
Explanations about what you were attempting don’t help either. Your portfolio isn’t evaluated on what you’re trying to do, it’s evaluated on what you’ve done.
I don’t spend a ton of time critiquing each individual piece of work. Growth and development comments are super useful to guide conversation during a critique, but an art portfolio review isn’t a critique.
Portfolio reviews aren’t about the potential of a single piece of work or how to improve each piece. It’s about how your edited collection of artwork sings as a group. What I’m saying is –
A great art portfolio review is about how it all works together.
Your art portfolio tells the story of your skills, ideas, and potential as an artist.
I understand that each work of art in a portfolio can take a long time to make. I also understand the process of making certain portfolio pieces is intense. It’s easy to form a very personal attachment to any project because of the time invested and the risks that you take.
It can be tough when a portfolio reviewer seems to skim over all your artwork. That silence can feel dismissive, scary, and vulnerable. This will sound harsh, but get over it. You’re going to need to practice getting over it if you want to create professionally.
Artists don’t get grades, not in any way that matters. You don’t get to check a list that says you’re good or bad. There will always be things that you’re doing right and things that you need to work on. There will always be details you might be missing.
Read more: Art Portfolio Ideas: Jumpstart Your Portfolio With These Ideas
Art Portfolio Review Questions
As I look through a portfolio, I ask a lot of questions. I’ll ask things like:
- Do you like to work in black and white or color?
- Have you worked large-scale or do you mostly make small work?
- Do you like to draw or paint better?
- What are you reading right now?
- Do you have a favorite subject in school?
Sometimes I’m confirming hunches or trying to figure something out. As we talk, I’m trying to learn about your interests and personality through your work.
Some artists will do everything fast and others take too much time. Some artists draw for other people and others draw only for themselves. Some filmmakers copy the films that they see friends making online. Other creators try to copy professional filmmakers.
Understanding how you approach making and what motivates you helps me give you feedback that I hope you’ll actually try.
Next, I’ll ask you to make some choices for the artwork that you shared. I’ll ask you to do some editing with questions like:
- Which piece is your personal favorite?
- Which is your most recent piece?
- What is your best piece?
- Why is it your best piece?
- Which piece do people that you respect think is your best?
- Do you agree? Why or why not?
I go through your portfolio and organize the work in different groupings. Then, we’ll talk about the ways these different groupings change how your portfolio looks.
I sometimes use the word “operates” instead of “looks” or “works.” I know that sounds a little puffed up, but a portfolio is a type of machine, and each piece of your work forms part of the machine. How you edit your portfolio determines what your machine does – and how fast and far it can go.
Art Portfolio Examples
To help you figure out how to edit your art portfolio for review, I want to share some visual examples. These are five different groupings of my art from high school. I’m using my artwork from high school because I can see how it might feel strange or invasive to see artwork taken apart this way if I used the work of a former student.
I’ve been doing this kind of experiment on my own artwork for years, and I show students how it changes their work when I edit their work during a portfolio review. I understand that my portfolio might not be considered great by today’s standards. There is a part of me that wants to defend my high school portfolio, but honestly, it is what it is. If you’d like to see my current work, my current portfolio is on my website.
The first art portfolio review edit is in chronological order.
In the remaining portfolios, the order of images is important. I’ve included the best piece first since that sets the tone and expectations for the rest of the portfolio. In the second portfolio example, I’ve edited to show technical skills like drawing from observation and working with different media.
The third and fourth art portfolio examples are variations on a concept or theme. I was a little all over the place, but there are similarities in subject matter, technical exploration, and mark-making that I’ve tried to emphasize in the editing.
The fifth art portfolio example is a combination, it’s the kind of portfolio I would put together if I was advocating for a student in a scholarship review. There are fewer pieces, and I included only the strongest technical and conceptual work.
Editing your art portfolio for review takes practice.
The process of editing a portfolio tends to come easier for photographers because so much of the work of photography is editing. They’re constantly analyzing different shots and deciding what to keep or print.
It tends to be much more difficult for traditional artists because each piece can take so long to make. This makes it a little horrifying to leave anything out. That feeling of horror goes away over time, mostly.
Art Portfolio Review Inspiration
After I’ve talked to you about editing, I’ll share some ideas as you continue developing your work.
I usually write down some artists that I think you should look at. Sometimes I offer artist names for inspiration, but I mostly do this because I see something of their work in yours. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think your work is original.
If you continue on the path to becoming a professional artist, people will compare your work to other artists. It doesn’t always feel good to have something original and yours compared to something that’s already out there. But you should know what it means when someone compares your work to John Currin or Kota Ezawa or Alfred Steglitz.
I also offer these artists names because I want you to look at them for yourself. I want you to decide if you see the similarities that I see. I want you to choose whether you’re for or against that comparison. If you’re for it, look at that artist and explore those similarities. But if you’re against it, do something about it, make some big changes.
If I write a long list of artist names or an art history book, that usually means that I think you need to stop making art in a hole.
What does making art in a hole mean?
Art makers in holes tend to either rely entirely on their own ideas or rely on a single source of inspiration. This limits where the work can go. If you spend too much time working in a hole you’ll progress slower. Also, you won’t know when you’re copying other artists.
Inspiration has ebbs and flows. Sometimes you want to feed your eyes with hundreds of images and sometimes you’ll want to shut out the world and invent on your own.
Humans unintentionally scan hundreds of images minimum every day. Those images come into your work whether you want them to or not, so it’s a good idea to feed your eyes the best images you can.
Give yourself room to experiment.
If you spend too much time looking at other people’s work, you can become so flooded with inspiration and visual information that it can be difficult to create a visual style that’s all yours. A mixture of feast and famine in terms of the images that you’re looking at is good.
Mentally Prepare for Your Next Art Portfolio Review
I want you to make the best work possible. You’re taking a huge risk sharing your work with me or any other portfolio reviewer. We know that. And, we want to give you as much valuable information as possible so that your portfolio review can help you reach your goals.
I know some of what you hear will feel really good and some of it will be a little hard to take. Just know that anyone privileged to see your portfolio wants you to be great at what you do. That’s what an art portfolio review is for.