Making a portfolio

   A portfolio should consist of your best artwork as it the first insight into what you do. It’s there to present and sell you. A successful portfolio consists of 15-20 pages of images that you are confident to defend and talk about when asked probing and inquisitive questions. I think a suitable size for a good portable portfolio would be A4 to A3 as you need to be able to carry it around. A good portfolio needs to be tailored to what you want to do or who you’re going to see so maybe having more than one would idea, so a portfolio for children’s books and one for editorial work. My main portfolio will be for children’s book as that is the main illustration work I want to get. I will try to make my portfolio as consistent and free flowing as possible so it reads like a book, I will make sure that all my images are strong but, make my last and first my favourite and strongest as this will be the last thing the person will see.

   The main things to remember when making images for a portfolio are:

-Equal boarders around all images

-Get the images printed professionally and on paper that presents your images best, for me it would be satin

-Keep it looking professional

-Make it easy to take your work out so if the interviewer wants to look at it closer and talk about it you can

-keep it interesting mix up your layouts, such as centred image, two images on one page or three thumbnails showing the best bit of your images

Interview tips

When you have and interview or showing find out as much about the company as you think you will need to know like what titles they have published and what they use such as paper or printing quality. Talk clear and do not babble plan what you would like to say and maybe point out things about your work that you think will help sell your work. Listen to their criticism you can disagree but consider what they say as they are part of the industry and will have more knowledge than you. Keep it friendly but speak correctly and don’t be scared to show your passion about your work it’s your life and they will want to hire people who are enjoy and are passionate about what they do.  Also remember keep eye contact and thank them for their time then email them 3 days later expressing your gratitude again.  Also don’t forget to leave your promotional items with them so they have something for them to look over and remember you by.

My portfolio
  After looking at tips on how to make a successful portfolio I decided to only use images I was confident with and could talk about. After deciding on these I decided to make my portfolio A3 sized due to most of my images would fit better on A3 and I wont lose any of the detail of the cut images. This portfolio is tailored to getting a job in the children's book industry, so I have picked images that are colourful and most of them are related to children's stories.

   After looking over my images I have found I only have 14 pages and thought though a normal portfolio would have 15-20 I would rather have images that I personally like and show my skills off the best than fill it our with images I am not so confident with. To print my portfolio to the best quality I did some test sheets so I could see what paper my work best prints on.

In the end I chose the paper that kept the colour best in the print and that came out the best quality.