Kristina Ness  ✨

I've been looking at a lot of game art portfolios lately and I wish I could give game students a crash course in how to build a better portfolio because I think there are schools out there that are clearly failing their students

First off, clarity is WAY more important than a fancy website. Can the person looking for your art see your art immediately without having to hunt and click through a ton of confusing menus? Make sure your art is front and center

Don't have the ability to build a website that makes your art easy to access? Something free like Artstation is fine. In fact, something like Artstation that just puts your art front and center on a very visible grid is the ideal format to shoot for

Write descriptions that describe which part of each piece you were responsible for! If I click on a rendered scene or render of a character I want 2 know if you did the concept or the modeling or the lighting. If it was a group effort credit the other artists you worked with too!

Show your process. Are you a character modeler? Great! Don't just shown a final sculpt. Show your mesh and show your unwrap and show your textures. Credit your concept artist if you worked from a concept. This goes for environment artists too. Show your meshes and unwraps!

If you don't think your meshes, unwraps or texturing skills are up to snuff just throwing your model in a nice renderer and taking glamor shots of it will not fool anyone. If your models have poor geometry the senior artists who live and breathe this stuff will be able to tell

No fancy rendering program will disguise your bad geometry. In fact, trying to hide bad geo by taking fancy renders is a really common thing to see right now so if you DO you have clean geo and texture sheets show them off and it will really make your portfolio stand out!

If you are an artist with a diverse array of skills it is better to make multiple separate portfolios and send over the one most relevant to the job you're applying to rather than trying to cram all of your work into one portfolio. Keep them all clean and simple