Highlight specific skills in your art portfolio, says NinjaBee's Fox

In Gamasutra's newest feature, Brent Fox advises game artists to highlight specific skills in their portfolio pieces, and shares other useful tips for artists showing off their work to prospective employers. "Each piece of art in a portfolio can serve to demonstrate a specific skill or ability," says Fox, who serves as NinjaBee's art director. "If you are planning to create new art to enhance your portfolio, you should start with a goal of highlighting a specific artistic skill." He adds, "Demonstrating technical ability is very important. However, even more important is also showing some traditional art ability along with the technical skills. Art that only shows technical skills will leave your portfolio flat and unimpressive." And while you can put something in your portfolio just to show that you know how to use Zbrush, you should also demonstrate your artistic ability by showing you have a handle on basic skills like anatomy or color/light. "You can't fool me," Fox warns. "Too often, artists put 3D models or concept art in a portfolio with a weird distorted monster or use a poorly executed version of a particular style, like anime, to justify bad proportions and poor anatomy. "Typically, these artists choose this subject matter because they think it hides the fact that they don't have a good handle on human anatomy. Even if the artist actually is capable of producing correct anatomy, without proof, it will give the impression that they can't." The full feature, which shares more advice for improving your game industry art portfolio, is live now on Gamasutra.