Creating an Award Winning Porfolio - Part 5: Editing Your Portfolio

Cecila Yung, Art Director and Vice President at Penguin Young Readers Group said, “If I can life with an artist’s weakest piece, I can work with them.”

Would your weakest piece hold up to the critical eye of a trained designer?

Is your weakest piece still strong enough to win you assignments?

Reasons to remove a piece from your portfolio:

If you have to make excuses for why a piece is weak, take it out.

Don’t keep a weak piece in your portfolio because you are too attached to it.  If you love a subject matter do revisit a it or rework on a piece that you feel could be stronger.

Ask 3 trusted friends to look through your portfolio and tell you their least favorite piece.

Does one piece stand out because it’s in a radically different style or medium? Remove it until you have a collection of portfolio pieces in that style.

It’s better to have a portfolio of all animals done well than a mix of animals and kids if you can’t draw the figure. If you are struggling with drawing kids, take a class, read books on figure drawing and sketch from life until you master this skill.

The best way to weed out weak work from your portfolio is to create new work on a regular basis. The more work you create, the quicker you’ll see pieces in your portfolio that need to retire.