Connor’s 97% Sheridan Animation Portfolio
About this Successful Student:
Connor is a student from Georgia, USA.
He took a gap year during portfolio season and worked on his portfolio full-time. He worked almost 12 hours a day creating his portfolio.
His grade was 97%, and the Sheridan Animation Program cutoff grade was 95% for international students
Components of this Successful Sheridan Animation Portfolio:
4 figure drawings.
2 hand drawings.
A character rotation
A short animation
A four-panel storyboard
2 perspective line drawings
5-7 pieces of personal artwork.
Unique Components of this Student’s Successful Animation Portfolio:
Connor tries to connect his pieces in his portfolio, such as having characters repeat in multiple places or developing props and environments from different scenes.
His personal work has a wide variety of pieces. He believes that showing a diverse breadth of artwork reveals how dynamic you are as a student. These varieties of art pieces can be 3D models, animations, comics, drawings of clothing, or other parts of your story that you’d have to design if you were employed at an animation studio.
In his personal work, he shows behind-the-scenes work of his other pieces. They love to see your process.
What Were the Best Parts of this Successful Animation Portfolio?
Connor has incredible hand drawings. His drawings show what the hand drawings should be like. His hand drawings have detailed construction lines. He recommends looking at professionals' hand drawings, not other students.
He also has very excellent line drawings. He recommends using a perspective ruler when drawing interior line drawings or cities. Most drawing programs, such as Procreate, have the perspective ruler tool. He used a plugin called Lazy Nezumi combined with Photoshop which was the most thorough perspective ruler available.
Connor’s Tips for the Best Animation Portfolio:
Expert feedback is the most helpful for creating a portfolio.
Advice from professionals, such as PortPrep, was most helpful for Connor.
Feedback can help make sure you accurately convey what you want. He says to only get feedback from people you can trust.
Connor also suggests creating multiple versions of each piece. Don’t try and get it perfect in one attempt. Explore your ideas fully by drawing them multiple times
Fewer people post rejected portfolios, but they can be valuable in understanding the portfolio process. Check out our youtube channel for more animation portfolio examples.
He says to avoid the ‘this is impossible’ mindset. It will hold you back and will cause you to procrastinate. It's better to just focus on each small task at a time, rather than seeing it as one big “portfolio”.
He says friends and family believing he would get in helped him be inspired to work. Garth, the animation tutor with PortPrep believing in him helped him feel like he could get accepted.
How can you improve your animation portfolio?
We can help with you create your successful Animation Portfolio:
Connor took our Complete Animation Portfolio Bundle, a program built around creating a Successful Sheridan Animation Portfolio. The bundle includes six 8-week art courses:
Animation Fundamentals 1 online 8-week class
Animation Fundamentals 2 online 8-week class
Figure Drawing and Anatomy online 8-week class
Worldbuilding - Character Design online 8-week class
Worldbuilding - Background Design online 8-week class
Storyboarding Fundamentals (link coming soon)
A 1-hour Animation Industry + Career Path Introduction at the beginning
A 1-hour Portfolio Presentation Session toward the end
3 art study books!
The Animatior’s Survival Kit
Atlas of Human Anatomy for the Artist
Art Fundamentals
Access to our exclusive PortPrep Discord channels with our growing community of artists
Connor also got help through PortPrep’s One-on-One Mentoring with Garth Laidlaw and got valuable advice on how to make his portfolio the best it could be.
