"Show Your Book": A Look at Art Portfolios from 1990’s to 2020’s, part II

The Trainee Portfolio

Almost 30 years ago, I put together the portfolio that scored me a job with Walt Disney Feature Animation. In the spring of 1997, representatives from Disney visited my school to look at student portfolios. They called me in for an interview and recommended that I submit my portfolio for the Disney animation training program that year. But the deadline was fast approaching and I would need to Fedex my portfolio to Disney soon (a daunting task - as I recounted in my last post, 1990’s portfolio culture was all about giant sized books).  

My teacher, the late Barbara Bradley, went over my portfolio with me, recommending what to add, what to take out, and how to arrange everything for best presentation. Also, I was given a paper titled “Walt Disney Feature Animation Portfolio Requirements”, as well as a “Sample Portfolio for Animation Internships.” All these years later I still have these. 

The Disney Animation Trainee portfolio requirements called for:

• Gestures (quick sketches drawn from live models, not photographs)
• Figure Drawings (more developed drawings)
• Animal Quick Sketches
• Animal Drawings (more developed)
• Sketchbook Pages

The guidelines state that you can add some refined works, like portraits, landscape/architectural compositions, illustrations or personal artworks that show your sense of light, color and design. They also say it's OK to add a couple of "well chosen" cartoon style drawings, but I was led to believe that Disney was primarily interested in foundational drawing skills. Hence, I weighted my portfolio heavily with my best recent life drawings and sketchbook work.

On the last day of my last semester in art school, a telephone call came through informing me that I was accepted into the Disney training program. I was elated! It seemed like such vindication of all the hard work - the sleepless nights and long hours at the drawing board - honing my skills up to that point.

However, I was a bit surprised after I arrived at Disney and had a chance to see some of the portfolios of the other trainees. Not everyone had followed the guidelines; in fact, I think one trainee was unaware that there even were any guidelines. Yet all the portfolios were brilliant; each one exhibited strong foundational drawing skills, but also artistic voice and individual taste. Perhaps I had been too concerned with rules and requirements; as I would learn over the course of my career: skill is important, but more so is vision. 

The Journeyman Portfolio

Pictured below are some of my portfolios from around the mid-2000s, featuring background layout work for various animated productions. Naturally, a journeyman portfolio should include professional samples, but when I was applying to the Layout Department at DreamWorks, my only experience was animation clean-up. I had no professional layout samples. Fortunately, Lorenzo Martinez (then head of Layout at DreamWorks) gave me a shot. I had to accept a trainee position, but I didn’t mind – I had my foot in the door and an opportunity to create the first of many professional samples.

I am forever grateful for the opportunity to hone my skills in the animation industry, and I believe my work would never have achieved the level of polish it has without the patient feedback and constructive criticism from my mentors and colleagues. They taught me a lot about drawing technique and visual storytelling; but they also taught me about professional mindset. From them I learned that the journeyman portfolio should be more than a showcase of technical facility; it becomes a declaration of the artist’s identity.

 

The Portfolio as a Mirror

The difference between the trainee and journeyman portfolio can be thought of in terms of the undergrad versus the MFA candidate. The undergraduate portfolio is about mastering fundamentals and learning the visual language of art. The graduate portfolio must show a cohesive body of work articulating a point of view. The first is aspirational (showing potential), the second is functional (showing intent).

The path from student to journeyman runs from the general to the specific. The trainee portfolio may simply include the best work the student has done so far. The journeyman portfolio should target a specific function. For example, within the animation industry, journeyman portfolios are usually tailored to a job category, such as:

• The Storyboard Portfolio (emphasizes storytelling, continuity, and staging)
• The Character Design Portfolio (emphasizes shape language, expression, model sheets and character turnarounds)
• The Layout/Background Design Portfolio (emphasizes composition, staging, perspective)
• The Background Painting Portfolio (emphasizes lighting, mood, color scripts)

Inevitably, our portfolios are shaped by the projects we work on, as well as the type of work we are drawn to (storyboards, character design, etc.) And yet we make choices in arranging our portfolios: what to show first? What to show after? What to include? exclude? What to emphasize? deemphasize? These curatorial choices reveal something of ourselves: our individual tastes, our own aesthetic judgments and artistic vision. Hence, each portfolio acts as a mirror reflecting the person we were at the time we made it.

Together, the trainee portfolio and the journeyman portfolio map out the arc of an artist’s career, while each portfolio is a snapshot of our progress. Cumulatively, all of our portfolios reveal our “artist identity”, something we'll explore a little bit further in my next post. We’ll also look at how changing technology has taken the art portfolio from a static thing to a multi-platform network that reveals a broader view of the artist’s identity.

“Show Your Book”: A Look at Art Portfolios from 1990’s to 2020’s, part I

The Big Book Era

In my last year of art school, I purchased a large book portfolio that measured about 20x25” and held about a dozen 18x24” pages. It was heavy, expensive, and comically unwieldy - especially if you tried to carry one on a bus in downtown San Francisco. I bought that large portfolio because that is what art students did at the time. In fact, I had to buy two of them because I needed to send one portfolio to Walt Disney Feature Animation, and another to Walt Disney Consumer Products (representatives from both divisions of Disney came to my school to look at student portfolios, and both expressed strong interest in my work - hence I was encouraged to apply to both while finishing up my last semester before graduation). I paid something like $60-$70 to mail each portfolio to Disney (which as more than I could afford at the time and so I had to beg my parents for the money… LOL). A couple months later, job offers came from both divisions, and I had to choose between Disney Feature and Disney Consumer Products. This was one of the most intensely exciting times of my life; I went straight from art school to employment in the animation industry.

Pictured below is the actual portfolio that landed me the job at Walt Disney Feature Animation - I haven’t updated it since. Some of the drawings have yellowed with age or fallen out of place, but otherwise, it’s basically the same portfolio I mailed to Disney in 1997.

The Ritual of “Showing Your Book”

“Show your book” was a phrase I first heard in the animation industry - in that venue, it meant showing your portfolio in effort to get jobs. Over the next decade, I would spend a good deal of time running around Los Angeles “showing my book” to animation studios, video game companies, advertising/publishing houses - anywhere an artist might ply his craft to pay some bills. I had a variety of portfolios, some tailored to animation work, some toward commercial illustration. And I had multiple portfolios of each kind because portfolio submissions typically required leaving your portfolio for review. Portfolio reviews could take weeks, even months, and you needed multiple portfolios in order to submit to more than one company at a time.

Artist portfolios, and the process of submitting them, would change quite a bit over time. Pictured below are some of the portfolios which I used to score industry jobs. As you can see, sizes run from the large 20x25” book portfolio down to an 8.5x11” binder. By the early 2000s, I think the animation studios were so overwhelmed with portfolio submissions that they simply didn’t have room; hence, smaller portfolios were becoming more acceptable - even encouraged. These hard book portfolios would eventually give way to the CD-ROM and the website portfolio.

A Timeline of Portfolio Evolution

Below is a rough timeline of artist portfolio sizes and formats. This timeline is by no means exhaustive or complete; it merely reflects what - and when - many animation artists were using to find industry work. We should also note that these categories overlap. For example, book portfolios continued in use years after the introduction of the CD-ROM portfolio, and some artists continue using big book portfolios even today.

Big Book Portfolios (1990s)

These giant 20x25” (or larger) books were great for showcasing your art, but handling them - let alone mailing one - was quite the challenge. I remember one of my illustration instructors relating his story of carrying one of these into an art director’s office - the giant book took up all available space on the director’s desk and knocked over a cup of coffee.

I should mention that Xerox technology was less developed back then, and artists often used photographic prints in their portfolio pages, which could become quite pricey. Everything about these large portfolios was pricey. And if you lost one in the mail… well, that was bad!

Nonetheless, the sheer size of these books conveyed a sense of gravitas or seriousness about one's craft (which was perhaps lacking in the smaller portfolio sizes).

Medium Book Portfolios (late 1990s/early 2000s)

After Disney, I went to DreamWorks, and the medium book portfolio pictured below is the one I submitted to get in – except the artwork is not the same. I updated it with newer drawings and submitted it to other studios, but I don’t think I’ve used this size of portfolio since about 2003.

Small Book Portfolios (Mid/late 2000s)

While I appreciated all the space for showcasing work in the large portfolios, I was relieved when small-book portfolios became acceptable. These were so much easier to carry around or send through the mail. Also, ink-jet printer technology had developed to the point where artists could make relatively decent quality - yet affordable - reproductions with their home computer. Thus, it became much easier to make many copies of my portfolio and submit to many more animation studios at one time. Plus I could send them in the mail without fear of losing one (in fact, portfolios were becoming “disposable” in that you might send one off in the mail without expectation of getting it back).

CD-ROM/DVD-ROM Portfolios (Late 1990s/early 2000s)

I never used one of these, but I was enchanted by them from the moment I first saw one. A colleague at DreamWorks showed me his portfolio on a CD-ROM - you popped the disc into the CD/DVD drive of a computer (most computers came equipped with one at that time) and it just started up (or “auto-played”). But it was so much more than a portfolio; it had animated menus, sound effects, music - even video clips! This was a revolution in portfolio design and presentation.

The CD/DVD was especially great for animators and visual effects artists, since it readily replaced the demo reel (usually VHS tape at the time). A light, thin 5” disc was much easier and cheaper to send through the mail, plus you could inexpensively burn as many copies as needed.

FUN FACT: Here is my ¾ inch U-matic tape which I used for all my pencil tests in the Foundations of Disney Animation (F.O.D.A.) Training program in 1997. These cassettes were commonly used in animation studios up till the late 1990’s, but I haven’t found a machine that could play one for the past 20 years or so. Obviously, a CD-ROM was easier to mail than one of these bulky things!

Website Portfolios (2010s/2020s)

As revolutionary as the CD/DVD-ROM portfolio was, animation studios would eventually realize that they didn’t need to deal with physical submissions at all. Artist websites had been around since the year 2000 or earlier*, but they wouldn't replace disc or book portfolios until years later. I continued to use book portfolios - and animation studios continued to accept them – throughout the 2000s. I don’t remember exactly when animation studios stopped accepting book portfolios, but sometime in the early 2010s, I became aware of companies saying: “Never mind your portfolio - just send us a link to your website or blog”.

Indeed, the virtual realm claimed much more than art portfolios. Since about 2012, every freelance gig of mine has involved remote work via the Internet. Every work-related communication has been via email, cell phone, or video conference. 

Building My Own Website

I was late climbing aboard the World Wide Web. I didn’t start uploading artwork online until around 2007. By that time, artist websites were proliferating rapidly, and art blogs had become hugely popular. The Internet was becoming a dominant means by which artists showcased their work and got “discovered”. Nevertheless, I remained slow to adapt.

In 2008, I set up this blog with the intention of blogging about animation and illustration art, in conjunction with building my own portfolio website. However, a multitude of projects distracted me, so my blog remained undeveloped. Eventually, I was forced to concede that traditional book portfolio submissions were no longer viable for securing industry work - I really needed an online presence. So, I configured my blog to work like a basic portfolio website. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked. My “blog-pretending-to-be-a-website” got a surprising amount of traffic (especially my “Perspective Notes” page, but that is a story for another blog post). And it was instrumental in scoring me a lot of freelance work for more than a decade.

After many years of intervening distractions, I finally set out to build an actual website. One year ago today, I launched tcstarnes.com to showcase not only my animation and illustration work, but also my teaching notes, perspective studies, and miscellaneous artistic explorations.

Admittedly, my website is flawed. I have been steadily tweaking it over the past year, fixing mistakes and making small improvements here and there. It may be an ongoing work-in-progress, but it is a website I needed to build (for reasons I will elaborate in another post).   

From Weighty Books to Weightless Links

As I look at the old book portfolios leaning against the wall of my studio, I’ve been thinking about how the form and content of artist portfolios has changed over the years. In this post, we’ve seen portfolios go from big books to websites. Part II in this series will address content: what should you include in your art portfolio? What to exclude? And how has changing technology shaped our perceptions/expectations of artist portfolios?

Footnote

* I remember visiting artist websites in the year 2000, and I assume some artists were probably uploading artwork to the web before that, but websites at that time required coding expertise. The rise of template-based portfolio platforms with "drag-and-drop" functionality didn't come along until years later. Also, the Internet was much slower then (most users were on dial-up connection). Images had to be low resolution, and video files were clunky at best. I remember the early web being associated with "low quality" (so far as artwork is concerned). This might be partly why it took so long for websites to replace traditional book portfolios.