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How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

Last post 06-03-2012, 4:31 PM by Tom Davis. 35 replies.
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  •  04-27-2012, 5:40 PM 383302

    How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Hi,

    I like most wish to get into concept art for games and film but do not know the best way to go about it.

    This would be my dream job and if I do not do it now I will regret not having at least tryed.

    Any help or advice would be great.

    Thanks

    Randy 


    Randy Debono
  •  05-01-2012, 4:10 PM 384175 in reply to 383302

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Draw loads, post images for crits. Recieve crits well and act on them. Draw loads.

    Maybe try the weekly challenges?

    Get active.

    I suspect you already know what you have to do... Cool


    AlReidArt.com
    Deviant Art Gallery
  •  05-01-2012, 4:11 PM 384176 in reply to 384175

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Could buy the Game Art special edition of IFX. It's nice.

    AlReidArt.com
    Deviant Art Gallery
  •  05-01-2012, 5:24 PM 384205 in reply to 384176

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Feng Zhu has a load of advice on portfolios for this in his youtube channel:  http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL
    http://www.madhamsterstudios.co.uk
  •  05-01-2012, 7:04 PM 384224 in reply to 384205

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Hi,

    Thanks for the reply......

    Randy 


    Randy Debono
  •  05-01-2012, 7:50 PM 384228 in reply to 384224

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Great link Banj, thanks for that.

    AlReidArt.com
    Deviant Art Gallery
  •  05-01-2012, 10:50 PM 384292 in reply to 384205

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    banjaxedmdt:
    Feng Zhu has a load of advice on portfolios for this in his youtube channel:  http://www.youtube.com/user/FZDSCHOOL

     

    Nice one!  I'll be checking that out for sure.


    Portfolio

    Sketches and WIPs

  •  05-02-2012, 8:12 AM 384352 in reply to 384292

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Start paying attention to everything Jon Schindehette has to say over at The ArtOrder. He's already posted a large amount of directly pertinent information on this topic, and there's an article up today that touches on this again. You're unlikely to find a better line into the AD side of the business.
  •  05-02-2012, 10:56 AM 384372 in reply to 384352

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Many moons ago I sent a letter (yes a letter, that's how long ago it was) to a games company asking what sort of thing they looked for in a portfolio and their advice was to create related art assests. For example produce some artwork showing a town seen from different angles, create scenes depicting the mood and feel of various locations, design some of the local residents and wildlife, create some of the items the player/protagonist will use, etc.

    Basically try and create several pieces of artwork that are clearly related to each other, rather than bombarding them with lots of individual, unrelated images. I think the reason behind this was to show you can not only turn your hand to lots of different aspects of production design (set, costume, character, prop, etc) but also showed you could work with unifying themes to create the illusion of a much larger world.

    It is old advice though, so I'm not sure how much of it is still relavent.


    http://infinatepixel.deviantart.com/
  •  05-08-2012, 4:42 PM 385750 in reply to 384372

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    It's still pretty much relevant Zinc as far as I know, one more recent thing you should take note of is apparently Games Industry Developers are very suspicious of people who have been on a games design course because they tend to be very generalised, bad news for me, in my case any chance of learning a real skillset was completely crushed in favour of stupid and nonsensical written assignments and coursework where we had to learn everything ourselves because the management just wouldn't let the teachers teach what we needed to learn.

    I can't tell you how to get into the industry but I can tell you what not to do, avoid anything in an educational institution that has the words "Gaming" and "Learning" within the same piece of paper, one thing that people do which I tried is work their way up in a games company by starting as a Quality Assurance tester, I finally managed to get an application accepted but the moment I got there after travelling for several hours I found out I had to do a bloody math test which had my worst enemy of all in education, percentages. There was a guy who was a university graduate or something and I think most of them were and he said that the second test made no sense either and I had glanced it over, it looked like something that a primary school teacher had printed out seconds before class in an effort to make it look like they were doing their job. They had obvious questions like "Try and spot the bugs and glitches in this screenshot" but the printouts were so terrible that I doubt anyone normal would be able to spot them easily even if they were blatantly obvious.

    Sorry for the rant, but I honestly believe that the games industry has been taken over by a bunch of corporate beuracratic morons and you'll have better chance working in the games industry if you either make your own company and work in a garage with people you know ( That's how it was done before and they made way better games ) or you join up with an independent company that is run well. Competition is really tough as well for all the usual companies and if I remember correctly I remember reading somewhere about how the games industry needed more programmers than artists but that was just off the top of my head so I'm not sure if that's relavant anymore.

    Anyway, hope this helps, I'm not trying to turn you away from the idea or anything but you don't want to waste almost two years like I did trying to get in the Games Industry, TLDR version, I recommend working independently or going for an independent company, established games companies now are more interested in ruining games than making them.

  •  05-08-2012, 6:26 PM 385760 in reply to 385750

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Lethn:

    bla bla bla...

    And here we go again. I know it's been said before but Lethn could you PLEASE not make it sound like you have extensive experience in the area? You've explained that you've had ONE bad experience. It doesn't mean all education, all teachers, all institutions and all gaming companies are corrupt. And to be honest, the gaming industry or any other industry in need of artists, don't have to be corrupt just because they won't hire you. Nobody professional would hire someone with your skill-level. (That's assuming you've really showed us what you're capable of.)

    Sorry if I'm mean but I'm tired of hearing the same stuff from you over and over when it's based on so little real experience.


    www.charlotteahlgren.com
    IFX Gallery
    Elfwood Gallery
  •  05-08-2012, 6:37 PM 385772 in reply to 385760

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    voluspa:

    And here we go again. I know it's been said before but Lethn could you PLEASE not make it sound like you have extensive experience in the area? You've explained that you've had ONE bad experience. It doesn't mean all education, all teachers, all institutions and all gaming companies are corrupt. And to be honest, the gaming industry or any other industry in need of artists, don't have to be corrupt just because they won't hire you. Nobody professional would hire someone with your skill-level. (That's assuming you've really showed us what you're capable of.)

    Sorry if I'm mean but I'm tired of hearing the same stuff from you over and over when it's based on so little real experience.

    Completely agree. 


    Yian 2012
  •  05-08-2012, 6:54 PM 385797 in reply to 385760

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    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    voluspa:
    You've explained that you've had ONE bad experience.

    From what I remember, it wasn't even his experience, it was someone else's.
  •  05-09-2012, 5:44 AM 385960 in reply to 385797

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Real classy guys, and you wonder why people get pissy with you, that is just my experience, yes, there are going to be fantastic courses etc. out there like for instance the life drawing that I went to but even the teacher there had bad experiences with the courses she went to, it may not be a pandemic ( which frankly I think it is ) but I'm certainly not alone particularly in the area I live in.

    What would be nice is if you lot could not form stupid and ignorant conclusions and then try to pass them off as fact, I was regularly in contact with a manager of the same games company I applied for who was on a different branch and even he said that they were all getting fed up with the QA department that I was trying to get into because they weren't testing the games properly. I don't care about me right now, because I'm doing my own thing. I don't recall ever saying I have extensive experience in this area ( feel free to quote me like you would in a proper debate if you feel so strongly about it ) yet again that's just you lot jumping to conclusions. All I'm saying is that from all the articles I've looked at, research I've done and talking to people a lot of the games industry is all turning into the same mess, a lot of games companies don't even have proper refund policies because the government knows nothing about the technology sector never mind the games industry. You also have many previously independent games companies being aggressively bought out to name a few, Westwood Studios, Bioware, then you also have the merger between Activision and Blizzard, ofcom have given barely any scrutiny to any of these tactics as far as I know so they've been able to freely start up a monopoly.

    People said I was talking bullshit about the eurozone collapsing and now they're looking like idiots because I actually do my research, have the decency to at least properly debate someone if you're going to say they're talking out of their arse, that said if I must I suppose I could make a seperate thread and pull out all the research I can do that blatantly proves my point because I don't want to turn this thread into a flamewar. Oh and this one may piss you off but there's a more recent article on it where a guy in gamespot actually got fired for giving Kane and Lynch a bad review and the company behind the game threatened to take away their advertising money over it so yeah the games industry is corrupt, I don't make accusations like this based on nothing.

  •  05-09-2012, 7:42 AM 385965 in reply to 385960

    Re: How to put together a portfolio and how to get in to game art industry

    Lethn we are not worthy of your time. You are too smart for us. We are just a bunch of trolls and the truth is insult was the only way we knew how to respond to your supreme intelligence. Perhaps you should move on to better forums. 

    Seriously, I recommend you go away and never look back. Leave us trolls here to rot. You deserve better. Go somewhere else. 


    Yian 2012
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