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 - most 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 work, 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 sometimes 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!
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 Portfolio (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 could now 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!
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. Portfolio websites had been around since the year 2000 or earlier, but they didn’t replace disc or book portfolios until 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?