Portfolio

This week I downloaded a simple portfolio app. Not because showing off a portfolio is high on my list. (It's not.) But because the act of sorting and judging your own work is extremely valuable. In the last three years, I've produced something on the order of two thousand sketches. First I organized them by year, and then went through ten in reverse chronological order. I learned a few things.

First, I remember drawing almost all of them, and many of them have good memories associated. Most of them are also not worth sharing and are a terrible representation of my current skills, and I only went through the last three years. And the further back I went, the fewer (a lot fewer) pictures I found that I'd want to share, even though I produced a lot more sketches two years ago than I have this year. It's weird to look at a sketch that, at the time I drew it, was a significant personal accomplishment, and now it's just a nice reminder of the progress I've made. And all of this is excellent news. It's nice to see proof that I've improved in the last few years, especially when a few years ago I was also happy with how much I had improved in the few years before that.

So, the portfolio app. My goal was to comb through my semi-recent work and come up with ten to twelve pieces that represent the sort of work I do and that were good enough I'd be willing to show them off. It should be possible to do this just by putting them all into a folder (since I'm working with digital images), but a folder on my computer just has too many distractions, making an already difficult job even harder. I was even hoping that this web site would help with tat process, but it hasn’t worked out. I needed something else.

This bare bones portfolio app provided the level of focus I needed. My process was to go through and find pictures that met my criteria: good enough to share, representative of my work, representative of work I'd likely do again. Then I dump all of those into the portfolio folder, and start weeding things out. Seeing them all next to each other, one after the other, made it easier to spot the ones that weren't quite as good as I had remembered, or that represented a different style of art than the rest.

I got ruthless and trimmed it down to twelve color images. And then I cheated and did another portfolio of twelve black and white images. Really, it was an excellent use of about an hour of my time and it will likely lead (eventually) to a reshuffle of this site. It was also illuminating to discover that I really have developed a specific process I prefer to use that results in the art I make that I like best. My next step is to lea into that process and continue improving.