Don’t get too discouraged — drawing is an incredibly important foundational skill that will ultimately make everything else you do easier. Start playing with Mudbox, ZBrush, and MAX. Play around, tinker and have fun with it. And keep drawing, too.

What’s important is to focus on the fact that art is really fun to do, but if you go apeshit careerist, you can make learning something cool a really miserable experience for yourself. Cling to the joy of it and just have fun learning something new in 3D. :)

Not sure where this site of your has been all my life, haha. I just discovered all these articles on my latest search for a real job and I can’t tell you how much of an amazing service it is that you choose to write these things for those who care to read.

I’m 24 and am only now free to try shooting for studio jobs but it seems Pure conceptual illustration jobs are few and far between. Aside from it being ridiculously competitive, more and more require that you know Maya/3DSM/Zbrush and out of naivete I just focused on drawing.

Would it be wise to stop what I’m doing and learn a 3d program to add to my resume or stick to my guns? I’m a decent character artist I believe and I can even sculpt maquettes and busts very well. I just want the best shot at a studio job because that is and will always be my lifelong dream.

If you have a single molecule of time, I’d love some feedback. Either way, I’m so pleased to have found your articles. Continue posting!
You’ve got a new fan.

And you need to keep at it with more than just applications, you need to be tenacious with everything you do. For example, so far I have two plugs for my project, (www.forum.razedentertainment.com), and now I have three! But it doesn’t stop there; applications, recruiting, advertising, design, descriptions, and so on. If you make sure that the person who you are dealing with knows the subject at hand as well as you do, you’ve won half the battle.

That’s a tough position to be in. It may be that brainstorming and catalyzing is your most valuable skill, but not your most marketable one.

At the portfolio screening phase of a candidate search, your best gift may be at best an incidental value add, but not something they’d base a hiring decision on.

I’d suggest making as many professional designer friends as you can, and examine their portfolios and find the common thread of what the most marketable and hireable skillsets are.

Take that information, and start building on those more marketable skills. Focus on landing a job on those merits. Then, once you’re at a studio, start letting your true gift show through and start adding value that way. You’ll begin to diversify your skillset and become increasingly irreplaceable, and you’ll be happy because you’ll be getting to do what you love to do. :)

As for putting together a portfolio that shows those skills, one idea is to take a series of design snapshots to show the iterations of your process of taking a bad idea and developing it into a good one, with some brief commentary on the decisions you made and why. If they can see the refining process, that’ll do a better job of communicating your skill than saying “I’m skilled at X.” :)

No one ever believes anything you say about yourself. What people believe is what other people say, or what your work says about you. Make it say a lot.

Reading the Get Hired section of a rather prominent though physically small company, it speaks of having a good filter for bad ideas, knowing what makes things fun, and how to make lackluster concepts more entertaining and quickly. These things are exactly what I can do. How can I articulate this to the employer?

Thank you for your article, it has done a lot for me and honestly changed the outlook I had regarding my own future prior to reading it.

If they’re going to turn down a candidate that so obviously wants to work for them because they sent more than one email to the automated job board address, would you really want to work for them anyway?