[Portfolio] – Amauri Ploteixa, Illustrator and Character Artist

JR

Ok guys, it's time to get a first impression from you, professionals and students, about my portfolio. I'm not at the game industry at the moment. I produce illustrations as freelancer and have a job as page designer here at my country. I'm illustrator for about 7 years, in most part for publicity and for publications.

My intention is to enter on game or movie/animation industry, as a character artist, or illustrator. So, I'd be grateful to hear your opinions about my portfolio. What do you think it's good points, bad points, what kind of stuff I should bet all my money, what you think should be removed. What do you miss in a portfolio for this position.

Feel free to crit or comment anything you want. I'm sure your opinions will be very useful.

http://jramauri.blogspot.com/

By the way, i'm currently moving the images on Gallery page to the main page. The idea is remove weakest images later, and maintain everything on the same place, for the sake of simplicity.

Tenchi

Your art is really good, especially your character studies. I like the design of the website, reminds me of CGHub. But others might prefer you separate your 3d and 2d art for quicker navigation. I would remove White Wizard and Rainbow Mika, they show how far you have progressed with the other pieces. I would give Pen

haikai

I always thought you did good work. The thing is, your work doesn't come across as "game character art" to me because of the kinds of models and illustrations that make up the bulk of your portfolio. It feels catered to a more broad and general audience, which isn't bad, but I imagine a lot of game studios might wonder where the hero characters are, and how you deal with more realistic details.

But that's just my first instinctive response. These could be perfect for certain studios. :thumbup:

Daelus

A few of the pieces feel unfinished to me, winter and shiva stick out to me. And, to poke a little fun, the white wizard. She wears black with gold patterns, has black hair, black boots. How is she whi- I see what you did there...

Delerium

haikai wrote: »

I always thought you did good work. The thing is, your work doesn't come across as "game character art" to me because of the kinds of models and illustrations that make up the bulk of your portfolio. It feels catered to a more broad and general audience, which isn't bad, but I imagine a lot of game studios might wonder where the hero characters are, and how you deal with more realistic details.

But that's just my first instinctive response. These could be perfect for certain studios. :thumbup:

Agree! You are obviously very talented but your portfolio is not very diversed, it contains alot of caricatures, well done though but not so suitable for a game (if its not Nuclear War 2 ).
If i where you I would focus on some bad ass hero designs and and replace some of your caricature studies of famous personalites with them.
I like the portfolio design though with all the images right in my face.

JR

Thanks for your input and honestity, guys. Before I posted my portfolio here, I was wondering exactly what you have said, if my portfolio was suitable for game industry. In fact, as most of works there are personal, they reflect what I really like to do: portraits, caricatures, non sense illustrations, like this - http://jramauri.blogspot.com/2011/04/old-mad-dog.html

Develop chars is something I really need to do more. But not in serious, realistic style. Today I aiming much mure stylized and funny stuff. My intention is go deeper in stylized and cartoonish stuff, something more in the Creaturebox guidelines. Maybe this doesn't work so well for the game industry, but for animation, I don't know.

Anyway, much appreciated opinions, thank you.

JR

Nothing more to add, guys?

Nils_Carstens

Hey i felt like adding my 2 cents.

You should always make sure that your contact and name are visible on both your side and especially on your pictures (your work might get linked or saved re hosted etc.).

I would change something about your layout. At the moment the thumbs of you images seem to be randomly generated (the way they are cropped and in their size).
Right now your side often ends up with big thumbs for some of your weaker works ( wich gives them more attention then they should have) and strange (bad) cropped images. Wich both hurts the over all quality of your presentation.
Use the size of your thumbs to direct people through your portfolio and make sure to have nice cropped thumbs as well ( weird or uninteresting crops are less likely to be viewed/clicked).

Lastly ask your self what's the purpose of this portfolio? Is it to get a job in the gaming industry? For animation etc. a lot of times "what you like to do" is not of importance while working for an industry. After all they simply want to see if you can get the job done or not.
Following that line i don't see a major problem with some fun illustrations within an portfolio, however caricatures in general especially of famous people are neither impressive nor something unique (i hope you get the point) and i would take them out (or at least just show 1-2).

Chrisis

Wow, your portfolio is amazing! I remember coming across some of those on the net.

One thing worth mentioning is that the blogspot thing does not support older browsers. This is what I get in my not-that-old firefox: "Dynamic Views in Blogger require the use of a modern browser, and are not currently supported on mobile devices".. Works fine in newer IE, tho.

JR

Hey guys, I'm moving my content to Tumblr. It's simpler to use, and let you separate stuff more easily. Let me know what you think.

http://jramauri.tumblr.com/

JR

Ok guys, a lot of time has passed after the initial post, and I produced some new things. I still want to be a character artist (both in 2D/3D) and I like to ask your opinion about the current state of my portfolio. What do you think? What is good? What is bad? What do you miss? Please help me to improve.

http://jramauri.blogspot.com/

Texelion

What do you mean by "I still want to be a character artist" ? You are not currently a character artist ? With your talent ?

About your portfolio, one thing : it's not a portfolio. It's a blog, we read it like a blog. And I think this is the problem. We can change the way we display the stuff, it's funny but also painful. I think your portfolio is too complicated. I heard a lot of guys saying "easier is better". The more easily we access the info, the better. The best is to access to anything in 3 clicks or less. Look at Fletcher's, Orb's, Romy's portfolios. They are simple but effective.

I just did one myself yesterday in some hours, Romy helped me. I tried to do it simple ( sorry to put the link in your thread, it's juste to show you ^^ ) :

http://julien-friedrich-portfolio.com/

Well for me it's simple because I mostly have 3D stuff and some 2D to prove my poor painting skills.

But you should do categories. For example :

Realtime Characters
Sculpts
Paintings
WIPs ( not really interesting imo, or you could use a blog for the wips and a real site for the portfolio ? )

And then in each category you put your works, the most recent first. Like this people will always see what they're watching.

Another thing : for some works you don't need to put a lot of pics. For example for the Ryu sculpt you put 2 frontal image and one 3/4. You could put a single image with front, profile and 3/4 views. it's the same for the warlord final : 2 front image with sword, then almost the same 2 images but without the sword... it's a bit useless.

Voila. I hope I helped ^^.

bugo

I think you have a cool style, but have you asked yourself where do you want to be or which company do you want to work for? Sometimes this helps.

I agree with Texelion on categories, you should try not mixing everything together and fit every single thing into a category, this way if the employer is looking for good sculpts he will know where to find. (I find my portfolio difficult sometimes as well... which I should fix)

I also had a hard time with thumbnails to say which one is 3d and which one is 2d, game companies will look for your 2d skills as a side helper, not as 1st priority. So that must be another category. But don't take them off, it's important for a character artist to know life drawing (more than illustration).

Although I love your style, have you considered doing some "game only" characters? I find that many people do a lot of personal work and forget about what employers want. I see you have a sense to illustrate more then concept something, I find that art in games is related to the technical side, someone might say different, but I believe that if you don't have both, you will suffer. And I can see that in your folio. You actually might have it, but I can't see that there. What I mean from that is, where are the wireframes, the texture sheets, the materials? If I was a lead, I would like to see how organized your UV's are, etc.

Don't get me wrong, again, your art is unique, and it looks great. Let me know if you got what I mean.

bugo

This is what I want to see on your folio:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=93380
(First page)

JR

Thank you Texelion and bugo. Very valuable feedback. In fact, I always preferred to mantain my blogfolio as a general portfolio, not game oriented. The reason for this is because here in Brazil, where I live, we don't have significative game companies. I work here most of time as illustrator or designer. But... games are a passion, since I was a kid. And now I see that I really want to work producing them.

But to reach this goal it seems that I must live as freelancer or be good enough to be considered to relocation for some company. And under this point of view, your crits are crucial.. I really must to orient things to the game industry, and put some more tech stuff there...

Texelion

You can keep it like a general portfolio, just organize it a bit ^^. And yeah, totally agree with bugo, adding some tech stuff is essential.

roosterMAP

bwahahaha, i love super dude!

The sheer amount of work you have in your folio is pretty astounding, and all of it is very high quality.

However, I think its overwhelming. Too much awesome stuff to look at. Maken me feel inadequate. haha

Ravanna

your talent is obvious.
You seem to be a natural illustrator, thats your strength, but i see where you use this advantage when texturing characters (example: orc)

You got stylised down, perhaps a few more realism game-res pieces.

Its industry standard though, surely?

bugo

jramauri wrote: »

Thank you Texelion and bugo. Very valuable feedback. In fact, I always preferred to mantain my blogfolio as a general portfolio, not game oriented. The reason for this is because here in Brazil, where I live, we don't have significative game companies. I work here most of time as illustrator or designer. But... games are a passion, since I was a kid. And now I see that I really want to work producing them.

But to reach this goal it seems that I must live as freelancer or be good enough to be considered to relocation for some company. And under this point of view, your crits are crucial.. I really must to orient things to the game industry, and put some more tech stuff there...

Aahh, being a Brazilian I do understand the same feeling, because I am also brazilian, and I have been in your shoes. Yes, unfortunately you can't be so specialist if you are looking to get a job there. But why aren't you looking here in US or Canada or UK? Have you thought about moving like I did? Or are you doing the portfolio just for fun?

I had the same issue, but if you look at the portfolios of people that are not in the brazilian industry anymore, like, Fabricio Torres, Pedro Toledo, Raphael grasseti, (maybe mine). You will see we all turned a bit more into the production set of art.