No matter how experienced you are in creating digital art, having a portfolio to display your work is essential. A digital art portfolio is a way to present your best pieces, demonstrate the range of your abilities and keep a record of your achievements.
Read on to learn how to make an art portfolio.
Before putting your art portfolio together, you’ll need to go through your work and select pieces to include. When choosing what to add to your portfolio, here are some things to think about:
Choose pieces that reflect your unique style and what you want to say. Art that best showcases your core identity as an artist should feature in your art portfolio.
This will depend greatly on your own art style. If you create art in a variety of mediums for different purposes and audiences, the pieces you choose for your art portfolio should reflect that spread. However, if you’re a specialist in a particular medium or style, make your portfolio a deep dive into that.
When deciding whether to focus on breadth or depth, think about the purpose of your portfolio. Are you applying for a job that requires you to showcase a wide range of art and design skills? Or are you putting yourself forward for a specialist course or degree in a single medium? Tailor your portfolio to the situation and the audience.
There’s no need to include every example of your work in a portfolio. Only include art that you are most proud of and reflects your talents in the best possible light. Think about how you might talk about each piece if asked.
Work that has won awards - or even just gained a few likes on social media - is likely to be engaging and interesting to others, so include it in your art portfolio. If your teacher, tutor, parent, peer or friend has praised your work, ask them to tell you what it was specifically that they liked, so you can keep this in mind when it comes to presenting your work.
It goes without saying, but work that makes it into your portfolio should stand out and grab people’s attention. You want your portfolio to be memorable, so choose art that will have an impact.
There is no hard-and-fast rule as to how many pieces of art you should include in your portfolio. That will depend a lot on:
Instead of thinking in terms of numbers, think in terms of time. How long do you expect to spend presenting - or for someone to spend looking through - your portfolio?
For example, if you have an hour-long job interview for a design role, you might expect to spend 30 minutes taking the interviewers through your portfolio and discussing each section. If you spend five minutes on each double page spread, that’s six double pages to cover your best work.
On the other hand, if a potential customer is visiting your website to decide whether to commission you for an art project, they might only spend a few minutes looking at examples of your work to decide if you’re the right fit.
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Creating your own website means you have complete freedom to present your work your way. If you’re a whizz at coding, building your own website should be easy. But if not, building a bespoke website could be expensive and time consuming. You may need to commission a developer to build the site and the cost of buying and maintaining a domain adds up quickly.
This is a simpler and more affordable option for creating a digital art portfolio. There are plenty of options when it comes to portfolio websites that include a hosting domain and simple page layouts for you to populate. They can be more restrictive than a bespoke website, but for the less tech-savvy among us this option is much easier.
Creating your own portfolio from scratch and saving it as a .pdf file is another popular choice. This format is similar to the traditional printed version of a drawing portfolio that tells a story and has a beginning, middle and end. You can include a contents page, explanatory text to accompany your work and be creative with the layout. It’s also easy for people to flick through at their leisure, simple to attach to emails when applying for jobs and can be printed out.
There’s nothing wrong with keeping it real and creating a physical art portfolio. Having something tangible to take to a job interview and flick through with the interviewers can be a brilliant way to showcase your art skills. However, it’s worth remembering that in this day and age many people will expect you to have some examples of work available digitally - whether that’s a social media page or a website.
If you create art in a range of digital formats, your portfolio should reflect that. You might choose to create a concept artist portfolio or a video showreel. You can present:
...and much more in this way. A video portfolio also lets you choose the timing and when to transition between pieces. Done right, it tells a compelling story complete with audio, animation and moving images.
In recent years, people have become very creative in the ways they showcase their work. From using QR codes on business cards to encourage people to view their websites to sending bespoke packages to hiring managers, the only limit to portfolio presentation is your own imagination!
The structure of your portfolio is very important. A good portfolio structure should showcase your work in the best possible light, tell a story about you and your experience as an artist and keep the viewer interested.
Here are some things to think about when deciding on your art portfolio structure:
Will it be viewed digitally on a computer screen, on a website, on a mobile device or in a physical format? This may affect how you choose to structure and present your portfolio. Will it require a cover image, for example? Or a contents page? Or will it be sectioned into different web pages to showcase your varied skills?
You might think it makes sense to structure your portfolio starting with the work you’re most proud of first and ending with the least impressive work. But people’s brains are wired so that we’re naturally more likely to remember the first and last items in a series.
Therefore, when structuring your portfolio, it makes sense for your last piece of work to be just as impressive as the first. Place less impactful work towards the middle of your portfolio, when viewers are less likely to remember it.
Whether you’re creating a concept art portfolio or a video collection, your primary goal should be to make people go, “Wow!”
But what else are you hoping to achieve? Do you want to…
Whatever your desired outcome, try to consider this when structuring your portfolio.
Art tells a story, but your portfolio should still include some writing. Page titles, names of pieces, project explanations and annotations can help to convey meaning and explain the process or purpose behind each piece. Annotations can act as a springboard for interviewers to learn more about your creative process and ask questions.
Adobe Portfolio is free with Adobe Creative Cloud. It lets you create beautiful portfolio websites, with unlimited pages and hosting included.
Check out some Adobe Portfolio examples.
Adobe InDesign lets you create digital publications like digital magazines, online documents and portfolios. Create your own professional layouts and use stylish typography and rich graphics, images and tables to display your artwork your way. Save your finished portfolio as a .pdf document so it’s easy to share digitally.
If you’re creating a showreel portfolio, Adobe Premiere Pro is the ultimate video editor. Import and edit, add effects and use professional templates to give your video portfolio a polished and professional look.
Looking for some inspiration? These example digital portfolios show what’s possible to achieve with a portfolio website.
Nathalie’s vibrant naturalistic paintings are brought to life on her website.
Smex Art
Alex Weir showcases his bold, vintage inspired work.
Rufi
Smooth curves, colour pops and minimalist interior design.
Katty Huertas
Painting, illustration and animation blend to capture human emotion.
Jesse Medlin
A black backdrop helps the photos of Jesse’s work stand out.
Rachel Adams
Rachel displays her portrait photography in different sizes and shapes for variation.
You should avoid the following mistakes when making an art portfolio:
There is no requirement to follow a theme in your art portfolio. In fact, if you want to display the breadth of your artistic ability, sticking to a theme could prevent you from displaying some pieces. However, sticking to a specific style for your formatting, font and background colours will help to make your portfolio look polished and professional.
A good art portfolio should: