How to Make an Art Portfolio to Find a Job in Game Development

You often ask us what should be in art portfolio to get into our studio. We decided to answer this and other questions in detail: we explain how to properly create an artist portfolio, what works should be included, and what studios pay attention to first.

What Should Be in Art Portfolio?

Your art portfolio should reflect your current level of knowledge. Create it in a way that gives a complete understanding of how well you grasp the basics of composition, geometry construction, color, lighting, perspective, and brushwork principles.

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Remember that works completed as part of educational courses are valued less than those made for yourself or an employer. If you haven’t worked on real tasks, come up with your own project and create graphics for it — this will allow the recruiter to better understand how your skills meet the studio's needs.

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Try to make your game art portfolio as diverse as possible — this will allow the employer to evaluate all the skills and knowledge you can apply to the job. In most cases, companies prefer a candidate with a variety of works rather than one who only draws portraits or line art. However, variety should not come at the expense of quality: if you are good at portraits but bad at icons, don’t include poor-quality work just to show variety.

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Artist portfolio must include works related to the gaming industry. If you only include personal creative works done in one style, it will be difficult for the employer to understand what tasks you can be trusted with. We often receive portfolios aimed at book illustration, the fashion industry, advertising, and even tattoos, but none of this is relevant to game development.

How to Create Game Art Portfolio to Get into a Specific Studio?

It all depends on the studio, the direction of its work, and its projects. First, study the company's cases and the portfolios of its employees, and keep an eye on what projects and directions they need artists for. It often happens that a studio rejects a candidate simply because there are no suitable tasks available.

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At RocketBrush Studio, we have a wide range of tasks, so we are interested in seeing the most diverse works. For example, in a 2D artist’s portfolio, we will look at icons, characters, illustrations, concept art, UI, animation, and other works. A large number of high-quality and diverse works is a good indicator that an artist can adapt to different tasks.

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Sometimes we need artists for specific types of tasks right away. In such cases, we look at works of the corresponding type to ensure that the candidate can handle the job.

What Does an Employer Pay Attention to First?

The most important thing is artist portfolio. If the employer realizes while reviewing it that you are not a good fit, then the resume and work experience won't matter — they will look at them last.

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Pay special attention to the quality of your work. We have often encountered cases where an artist excels at rendering and the portfolio looks good at first glance, but upon closer inspection, elementary errors are found: poorly drawn ellipses, mismatched perspective lines, and so on. If such basic errors are noticeable in the works, the artist will most likely be rejected.

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In addition to high quality, it’s important to show how well you handle work independently. Therefore, include not only projects completed during courses but also your own works. It’s important that the quality of these works is consistent; otherwise, the employer will think you need a lot of feedback during the work process.

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It’s an additional advantage if you show improvements in the quality of your own works after completing courses.

How to Properly Format Your Works?

There are no strict requirements for formatting works in art portfolio, but it’s important to follow general recommendations:

• Publish your portfolio on a public site, such as ArtStation, Behance, or Cara. Do not use archives or sites where the user needs to register to view works.
• Ensure the easiest possible access to each work. Break long sheets into smaller parts, don’t place many works on one canvas, don’t split them into small folders, and so on.
• Indicate the purpose of the work — for example, “work for a specific project” or “personal project.” Also, if the work was done during a course or lesson, or is a study from someone else’s work, it is good practice to mention that.
• Do not delete old works but place them at the end, mark them as archived, and indicate the date of completion. This will allow the employer to evaluate your progress over the relevant period and understand that you consider these works outdated.
• If you include works created with the help of AI in your art portfolio, be sure to mention this, and add the generated result and the final result after refinement. Remember that no matter how important AI skills are right now, your artistic skills are even more important.
• If you mention projects you worked on in your resume or cover letter but cannot include the works in your portfolio, describe what you specifically did for the project and what you were responsible for, and provide a link to it (if it is released).
• If you include works in your artist portfolio that were created in collaboration with others, indicate this and describe what you specifically worked on.

Also, if you have work experience, briefly summarize it — describe how many years you have worked, in which studios, and on which projects.

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