The Art of John Uibel

Portfolio Critical Mass achieved?

Spent the past few days going through the old files and posting more images to my portfolio. I’ve added several dozen more concept illustrations, photographs, storyboards, sketches and a wide variety of whathaveyou. But I still have hundreds more. The big question is: just how far back does one go with this stuff? The point of my portfolio (I’m guessing) is that over the years I have been able to use my creativity in a large number of venues. And I enjoy that aspect of my creativity the most — spending too much time in any one thing tends to make Jack a dull boy. Although, to improve in each of those areas is, of course, a constant drive — there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. Right now in addition to my day job I am quite content to be involved in: several major resort design projects with MVL Design, co-authoring a Photoshop CS2 textbook (Adobe Photoshop CS2 BASICS), designing a commercial CD product, and other unmentionable projects are waiting in the wings, not to mention family, church, etc.

In my quest to better my craft (remember though: no time left in the day leaves little time for quest-ing), I have stumbled across the websites of people who do this sort of thing much better than me — see the “People to Watch/Places to go” links in the sidebar¹. I look at their work and am usually stunned. To be honest, in my freelance work I have never been asked to design a scary necro-monster with dagger fangs and an exposed spinal column. Or a jungle planet with a futuristic city surrounded by gargantuan waterfalls and paleo-beasties. I’d like to (hmm, maybe not the necro-monster), but they just don’t seem to be that much in demand among my clientelle. I tend toward more “down-to-our-earth” jobs: storyboarding car chases or conversations between normal people in normal situations and the like. Designing film and TV projects with marginally-respectable budgets. And water parks, exhibits and high-end resorts (some really cool ones, by the way) all of which I’m quite happy to take! These jobs keep me very busy and constantly working which tends to force me to improve (remember: no time in the day to do it by myself). And there’s plenty of room for me to improve even on these projects. So I’ll continue to do so². I’m going to go look in my blogroll now.

1. and BTW, I hate that word “Blogroll”. Isn’t that a Swiss nougat candy of some sort? [back]
2. The challenge is: being able to do what I do — fast. Speed seems to be the single most important quality. That and Quality. Speed seems to be taking care of itself (since there’s no time to be anything other than speedy). It’s quality that’ll drive ya nuts. And it’s a long drive. [back]