Portfolio Review

[Ryonok]

Hello everybody. My name is Randy Toroni, I am trying to develop a portfolio for Riot Games and would like some input into what I can do in the next month to prepare my portfolio for my graduation from AAU in SF.

These can be found on my professional website at www.randytoroni.com

[darktiste]

would be cool to see some fan made of riot work but i dont mean to put it in your portfolio.And look at this http://www.riotgames.com/ if you didnt

[Ryonok]

Yeah I have seen there website and have been in contact with them. I am working on a project that is specifically for them to see though.

Tera- The King Slayer. She is a character I am designing specifically for my Riot Games portfolio. After I get this Character Sheet done in the next week I am going to go full steam on making a Splash art Illustration of her in action. I gotta get it done though before December 5th for the Massive Black Workshop in LA.

[Newcalibre]

Hey Ryonok,

You have some great work, man. I can definitely see your potential in working for Riot or similar developers in future. Some feedback on your folio as a whole:

You've nailed the 'cool' aspect of your paintings. Your ideas, designs, silhouettes are all fairly compelling, and will only continue to get better. The problem is that they're not all built on a solid foundation. There are aspects to some of them that don't look quite right, but they're disguised by rendering, polish, and the fact that it offers something more 'diverse' to your portfolio.

There are some concepts that don't look fully resolved, and they seem like they're victim of "that's what it started with, so that's what it will be" (mostly regarding your concept art). You need to be more discriminative in choosing what needs to be pushed/refined further to be resolved, or what needs to be culled because it's not strong enough.

This is where you will develop your standards as an artist. Only ever put forward your strongest work and best ideas, because you need to have that conviction and integrity before your work even goes back to your art director for review.

Even more important than having a body of a lot of work is having a body of work which consistently reflects a professional level of outcome. Companies will pass up on hiring someone with the coolest ideas that aren't supported by equally strong work, in favour of someone with blander ideas that are of a high, consistant quality in terms of art. I'm not saying this to nitpick; you have a lot of potential, but it's just a fact that Riot has very high standards to reflect the high quality of their brand.

A month is a short timeframe, so some advice on what you could do before graduation:

You can continue working on your Tera character sheet and splash art, but apart from that refrain from adding to your folio at this point, as you won't be able to resolve the work enough before graduation rolls around.

I'd probably focus on doing a cleanup of your concept art gallery. There are some duplicates that show cropped closeups of designs that have already been shown before. I don't feel these are necessary, as it's not cohesive in which painting belongs to what project. Keep them on the same sheet.

Be critical about culling paintings you honestly aren't sure about or don't believe are up to par. Your work is only as good as your weakest piece, and for a big player like Riot you definitely need to pay attention to this.

Do a beauty-pass and polish what remains. I don't mean overwork and hyper-render, I mean make sure all aspects of your paintings are consistent in quality. Set a 30 minute timer, know that you only have 30 minutes, and polish up a painting. At the end, stop all work, move to the next one, repeat. In a day you'll have tackled all of your work.

Your Dominance War designs are an example of something that's consistent in quality, but even this could use a bit of cleanup in presentation (artists can tell when things have been left tastefully loose and when they're just not refined enough; the construction lines on the ground strike me as the latter). Clean up your cast shadows, and an example of one of your mechs up the top of your page, render out the 'wing' receding into the background with some basic value, rather than leaving this as your thumbnail lineart.

Which brings me to my last (and most important) piece of advice- focus on presentation in this next month. Make sure the cohesive flow of work either reveals paintings that are obviously part of the same project or a standalone design.

If you haven't already, take a look at Paul Kwon (then Shiramune, these days Zeronis) as an example of good presentation, and model your work off his. http://zeronis.deviantart.com/gallery/

He's now working for Riot, and if you dig through his gallery to the older pieces, his progression reflects not only an improvement in painting ability, but a marked improvement in how professional his presentation of concepts are.

All in all, you're doing good work. If you polish up your presentation, it will have more value, and will become a show-stopper at your graduation :)

-NC

[Ryonok]

Wow I really appreciate this long and in depth review of my portfolio NC!!! Gosh its nice to hear a set message, allot of what your talking about I am and have been in the process of doing. I have been looking at Pauls work for quite awhile and am mimicking the presentation style and what not so I can stay up on there quality of work. I definitely agree about the concept art area being crowded with copies and unfinished stuff. the recommendation of how to polish my gallery was a great one! I am definitely going to do that!

Thanks so much for your time! I hope to update this page with a new finished portfolio soon to show off!

---

Also what do you think of my portfolio website? Is the layout and design good enough?

[Newcalibre]

Not a problem man, I look forward to seeing the final result when you're done.

The site design and layout are fine. I'm probably a bit picky because I design and build sites for a day job, so just ignore my comments if you think it's fine as it is :). I'm also not sure what kind of control you have over customization of a Weebly site.

If possible, make sure the thumbnail styles are consistent for your illustration, concept art and sketchbook galleries. I personally like how tight the grid is in your concept art gallery, so I'd recommend basing your thumbnails off that. Compare it to the Illustration gallery with the deeper margins and you see your eyes flow easily from one to the other (this helps people gloss over your work quickly) in the concept art gallery, whereas in the illustration one the separation is too abrupt and the thumbnails feel disjointed.

The sketchbook thumbnails can remain a 4 column grid, just close up the gutters a bit to keep it consistent with whatever you do for the other galleries.

Order your gallery so that your stronger pieces are in the top 9 of the grid as this will be the first ones they see, and save a couple of strong pieces to end with toward the bottom.

Also, if Weebly allows you to either upload separate thumbnail art or control how the image is cropped for the thumbnail version, fix up the thumbnails so they crop the image at the best point of interest. This is most noticeable in your illustration gallery- e.g. the crotch shot of your red warrior would be better as a bust

You should remove tutorials from your navigation. You can add it back in later when you have content for this, or alternatively you could host your tutorials elsewhere like your deviant art. You want to narrow the focus of your portfolio site to present your work in its best light, and you want people judging the quality of your art, not judging the quality of how well you teach ;).

Finally, I'm a bit of a minimalist, so I'd personally get rid of the banner atop each of the different galleries. This pulls the focus back onto the work itself. You can get to the grid quicker and see more of it when you land on the page, and if you rearrange the order of your work so your best work is up the top of the grid, this becomes your new feature.

The banner doesn't really serve any purpose; It doesn't feature your work in its best light because it's too narrow to crop anything comfortably. It's also not live text so it doesn't serve any SEO purpose. You can keep it for the blog and about page to separate the body content from the header.

Less is definitely more. There's an elegance in not spelling everything out, and having the confidence that the user will know where they are in the site with something as subtle as the current page indicator in the navigation. You could draw more emphasis to it by bolding it as I've done in this example.




If there's anywhere that you can add custom CSS to your Weebly site, and you need help tweaking any of this, just let me know ;)

-NC