At the beginning of this year, I set a new year's resolution to finish my portfolio. And I’m proud to say that I have achieved it just in time! This is my very first portfolio and I’m definitely no expert on this topic. So, in this post, I'm just going to share the things I found helpful during my portfolio-making.
For starters, I do recommend Illustrating Children’s Books: Creating Pictures for Publication by Martin Salisbury. It doesn’t touch on portfolio much but this is very informative book on picture book making in general.
As a self-taught illustrator, who had never been to art schools (I have done a few illustration workshops and short courses but they left me with nothing portfolio standard) and had never done any commissioned work yet, I had to create illustrations from scratch for my folio. First, I gave myself a project called Food from Books. The project definitely helped to fill substantial part of my folio.
In this summer, I joined AOI (Association of Illustrators). One of the membership benefits was Portfolio Consultancy with Fig Taylor and it was absolutely worth the money! Among other advice, since my major interest is in picture books, she suggested me to add some character designs to show my consistency and versatility; Consistency - ability to make a character look like the same person in every picture; Versatility - ability to draw various expressions, nationalities, gender and age etc.
