Final Tips and Advice

• Focus on building a strong understanding of art fundamentals. Those will carry you through programs over your career and make you a stronger candidate in the end.
• Try a variety of art disciplines (FX art, character animation, 3D environment creation, character creation, etc.) across a wide variety of art styles and workflows during your first few years developing your portfolio. This will help you…
• Find one area and master that discipline or art style. At least at first. Once you have a strong showcase of that skillset, then look to expand and keep developing new skills.
• Curate your portfolio. Ask your friends, family, or online communities which pieces they like the best. Ask them which they like the least too. Look at the answers you get. You will start to see a “ranking”. Think about removing the pieces that get less interest from your public portfolio.
• Unfinished pieces are great for a “work in progress” blog or social media account, but your main portfolio should have fully finished pieces. That includes posed characters, lit environments/prop/foliage sets, and well-rendered fx/character animation reels.
• Avoid including art tests in your portfolio unless you get clearance from the company. Always ask first! If you do get the OK to include one in your portfolio, only use it if you got hired or made it past the art test stage.
• Do not use logos on fan art pieces. If you need to use a logo to communicate you are aiming for a certain game or universe, then chances are it is not successful.
• Finally, create art that you enjoy! That can pertain to the theme, workflow, art style, or some other reason.

Those are just some pointers based on what I often come across in portfolios. Of course, every team is different, and there are always people or places looking for different things. So please take all this as one viewpoint, and not absolute rules. Getting a variety of opinions from people at different tenure levels, seniority levels, and at different places in their career can be helpful to see where you line up best with. Hopefully, these will help you as you build your skillset, focus area, and portfolio.

Jeff Parrott, Senior Art Manager, World of Warcraft

Blizzard Entertainment is always looking for artists and animators to join our ranks. We hire from all over the world and have openings across our Game Development and Story & Franchise Development teams. Check out our current roles and if you see a potential fit we’d love to hear from you!

https://magazine.artstation.com/2020/07/blizzard-entertainment-crafting-a-portfo...