portfolio advice
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Hello,
I'm always reading on here and love to read what other creatives have to say.I was wondering if anyone would mind taking a look at my portfolio and giving me any and all feedback. I get a lot of positive feedback from friends and family, but I would love some honest advice from other illustrators.
I am hoping to start sending my portfolio out to potential clients and maybe even agents, but I just don't think my work is there yet and would love to hear what other people think, so that I can improve.
thank you!
Bridget Bick -
Hey.
Taking a quik look at your website, i think the text on the contact site is just really big, maybe you could play arround with the fonts and size of the fonts.
I dont feel like i can give some adequate critique yet, about your artwork, i think i have to learn to give some good critique first.
But as someone who studied Graphicdesign the font size really bothers me.I hope this is an okay feedback for you.
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@bridgetbick You said you want honest feedback so I'll be honest.
Overall it's alright actually, but there's one big thing sticking out to me.
Something about the way you draw faces is really creepy and uncomfortable. Particularly on the snowboarding image where they're looking straight at the viewer.And also in the clinic room, the check in clerk is staring creepily at the mom and child.
The kids with the snowman look like they have puppet jaws, which is maybe one thing that makes it seem creepy.
But I dont know, that could all be because of my own tastes. I actually dislike a lot of kids artstyles tbh so I'm biased.
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@Frost-Drive thank you! I really appreciate the honesty!!!
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@von_Nimmermehr thank you! You’re totally right I’ll take a look at that.
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Hi @bridgetbick, you have great variety of illustrations, perspectives, animals and kids and adults and some vehicles. Checking all the boxes. You have a consistent style and color profile in your work too.
I say submit to agents now! Perhaps you find that perfect agent that will help you with your career. Even rejections are great because that means they saw your work and might even provide constructive feedback.
If I could offer some feedback, I suggest you keep working/pushing on storytelling and emotions.
Best of luck!
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@Jeremy-Ross thank you so much! Big confidence boost for me!
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@bridgetbick I do feel the same about the faces though I agree it could be a stylistic thing. But I'm wondering if maybe the faces are more realistically rendered than the rest of the image so that's why they feel out of place.
I also agree with Jeremy you have a consistent style which is not easy to do so well done there!
Are there artist's that you are looking at that use that style? I find Lee's tip to put your art in the middle of a grid surrounded by professional artists with a style similar to yours to compare is the most helpful to figure out what areas we can use to improve
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Hi, @bridgetbick -- welcome and thank you for sharing your art with us!
As others have said, you've done a lot of good things in your portfolio: it's well organized, focused on a specific style and market, and shows a variety of kidlit-friendly scenes. Great job!
Feedback? I'd love to see a bio or something that helps us get a sense of who you are. You don't have to be overly friendly or share your entire life story, just enough to let some of your personality shine through.
Feedback about the illustrations. While you do have good body proportions in many of the human characters, they feel top-heavy. Their heads are rather large, which probably contributes to the puppet look some have mentioned. That's not to say that you never see illustration styles in kids' books with overly large heads -- many, many books have characters with heads that defy physics! My guess is it's the combination of large noggins and the placement of features that's the problem for you.
In looking at all the characters in your illustrations, if I isolated their facial features, I wouldn't be able to tell if the character was a child or an adult. (That can easily look strange or creepy to viewers.) Kids have softer, rounder features. If you soften the faces (rounder cheeks, rounder lines) and set the eyes farther apart, your kid characters will look more like children than small adults. In your adult characters, you can have sharper lines, more angles, closer set eyes -- I'd also move their eyes up in their heads to really sell that these characters are adults. (You do a good job of drawing the adults to look friendly and approachable -- don't lose that!)
To help visually show what I'm trying to explain, I took a screenshot of one of your illustrations and made a few adjustments, mainly using liquify in Photoshop:
This is what I did:
- Made their heads slightly smaller
- Softened their faces, making them rounder
- Moved their eyes and noses down
- Set their eyes wider apart
- Rounded their eyes and noses
- Toned down the eyelid and darkened the upper lash line
- Turned up the corners of the girl's smile and made the boy's mouth slightly smaller
Hope this was helpful -- not meaning to step on any toes or change your art to the point where it doesn't look like "you".
And lastly, to give feedback on your statement "I don't think my work is there yet." I agree. As @carlianne suggested, have you put your art in the middle of a grid with recently published children's book illustrations? Do you see a disconnect? If I were to find a comparable children's book style to yours, I think of the original Magic Schoolbus books -- a very popular series, but they first came out in the 90s.
Now, if you absolutely love your style, keep it! Just know that it might be more difficult to land clients or an agent because it's not a style that's "in" at the moment. In that case, you might want to focus on honing your skill in storytelling, consistency, and conveying emotion. And raise the cuteness quotient -- cute characters are hard to resist, no matter what style they're rendered in!
Again, hope you find this feedback helpful. Thanks again for sharing your art with us. Looking forward to seeing where you go from here!
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@Melissa-Bailey-0 wow! Thank you so much for the time and effort you put into your responses! I really appreciate all of the the feedback> you made some awesome points for me to work off of. I will keep you posted!
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@carlianne thank you for your feedback. I really appreciate you taking the time to respond. I’m going to try the grid today, I’ve heard lee say that before but I’ve never actually done it. Thank you!
