I just made this page for inclusion in a DVC Career Education Canvas Class Activity Page for students – any student suggestions to make it better?
Activity Page: Learn about Portfolios for Art and Craft Occupations
Most artistic and craft based occupations require you build a portfolio of your work. You need this so employers and clients will be able to see the quality of your design and/or construction work before they hire you. A portfolio is there to show the employer/client your aesthetic abilities, your range of styles, and demonstrate your ability to present and organize your work product. In broad general terms this applies for all artistic professions, regardless of type. You can learn about the specifics of your particular art(s) in a later project, but for now, view the following videos and web pages on a small sample of the wide assortment of jobs that require portfolios, and then reflect on what parts of this might apply to making a portfolio of your work.
Seeing what portfolios look like for these professions, describe what you think you can or should put into a portfolio to demonstrate your abilities in your area of study.
Putting Personality in Your Portfolio & Resume the respectable sounding title TD&T put on my how-to on the topic: Stroking Your Own Ego to Get Jobs is my broad general advice on this topic. Both versions of this cheery screed have their strong points, as well as different bits of my old portfolios. However, there are a lot of specifics I can send your way as well:
It costs me a low amount of money to operate annually, but hundreds of hours total to make, update and repair, done in little fits and starts of just a few hours or days every six months or so. You need to start your portfolio soon, and work on it whenever you create work on a new show or project (or have time to mess with it) to insert it in as an update.
If you poke around this site you will find it also links to some PDF portfolios I post at Issuu. Some employers want PDFs, so having them already posted online is useful.
These last three (Issuu, Shutterfly and YouTube) cost me nothing at all to operate, though they also take time. So you have many available formats for displaying your portfolio materials online, may of them free to use. Having good material on multiple platforms that can interconnect gives you more exposure and more options of ways to show off your work.
If you are/were a student at DVC and are looking for images from shows you have worked on, or past classes with me that you have done since 2009 I also encourage you to both go to DVC Drama Photo Archive and Portfolio/Resume Advice a multi year project where I have been uploading photos of past shows at DVC (for use in student portfolios) and advice on how to make different types of them.
Free Techie/Designer Resume Template(MS Word.doc). This is a great sample resume template for beginning designers and other Theatre Tech emphasis people, created by Kade Mendelowitz , the TD/LD of UAF who is a former colleague of mine. You can download the file and open it in your word processing program to use it.
Here are some very clear simple basic portfolio how-tos to start you off if you really have no idea what a portfolio is or what to do:
The single thing that helps most with your portfolio is taking lots of pictures and then sorting and organizing them by topic so you can find the ones you need. After that it is just labeling. So if you have access to any stuff you have made, photograph it NOW, and start organizing. Two tutorials I’ve done on how to do this are here:
Free portfolio hosting sites have a variety of styles of presentation that you may prefer, so poking around these places may have you find a free option that suits your aesthetic needs:
