2D Animation Portfolio Advice

Thanks very much PQ, very kind of you

Hi FritzInTheFlesh - all my comments are based on the entry requirements for University of Hertfordshire, so will be tougher than most university's requirements - so if you feel that I'm being too scary with my requirements, don't panic; it will be much easier elsewhere.

Life drawings - good selection of work. Feet are good, keep those. Observational drawings from Bournemouth - remove the car, it's badly drawn - only show us you can make good work and we can only think good things of you! Keep all the rest of the drawings in the portfolio - all good for us. Nice to see some bird studies (we like to see animal studies - if you have a pet, draw them from life when they are sleeping etc)

Personal Illustrations - Good - keep all these (fix the spelling mistake on Illustrations)

Character Design - I like these, my criticism would be a lack of turntable drawings (front, side, back, three quarter images of the same character to scale, Then add pose sheets for each character - what do they look like in different poses - a confident swagger, a terrified sprint for the last bus home, slumping after losing a hectic online deathmatch etc... think of scenarios that fit their personalities and draw them doing them. Then add a sheet of facial expressions. If you really want to impress us add a sheet of phoneme shapes for the mouth to show the poses you'd need to do lip synch with. Also any props should go on a prop sheet (if applicable). The quality is good, just work on the above missing stuff.

Concept Art - I like the houses, they are lovely, but now draw them for me in two point perspective. All the art on this page is good except the bottom two images - left is badly painted and the right one is indistinct - I don't know what it is.Drop those two. What you need are some environment drawings / paintings in at least two point perspective. And colour please! I'd love to see that fairy tale house in colour.

Bouncing ball animation - this is fine. Square falling - same - this is fine.Squishy square is fine. The character walk is quite good, although doesn't loop properly which makes it look stuttered - see if you can remove or add a frame to fix this. The other animations are good. The jumping character jumps off the ground before they have used their knees to push themselves off the ground! I would drop this one. The moongirl animatic - animate this in full; we're not really interested in animatics; they do not show if you can animate. Family jewels - the backgrounds need a lot of work - no perspective or the perspective is broken... the foreground elements are slipping when you do the tracking shot, so you need to stick them on different layers and animate them so they move at different speeds (further back moves slower than those closer to us). There's a lot to be done to fix this, so it might be better to just do a short 5 second clip of one of your characters animated (full body) doing something interesting. If that involves showing feet movement sticking to a background that would really help as well. Do one of these in full colour, then do other animations in line to show off your understanding of movement. Film yourself acting the sequence out ( or get a friend to do it if you know anyone that moves in interesting ways) and use this as reference - don't trace (roto) it, just look at it, and then exaggerate the motion to give it more personality.

Backgrounds - where you use a perspective grid these are working, but for some reason in every image you stop using the grid for key elements which breaks the overall perspective...
Carnaval Background - this is good, except you've used three point perspective for the right half of the image and two point for the left half. All the vertical lines on the left side of the central building need to converge on the vertical vanishing point (VP) above the image - the VP that the vertical lines on the right are converging on. It would be worth fixing this, because its a good background (I'd love to see this in colour!)

Street Corner (fix your spelling mistakes!) The centre of this mostly works, but the perspective gets dodgy in many places - the windows are randomly placed and ignore perspective, as do the wooden planks. This one needs more work to fix - you must draw perspective grids and use them.

Living room - this is good - the diagonal line in the middle of the window is odd though - what is that? You need to put a space between the coffee table and the sofa or nobody will ever be able to sit there! Also slope the back of the sofa - it would be incredibly uncomfortable to sit on! I'll ignore the confusion regarding recesssion of chequered pattern in the room on the right...

Animation backgrounds - sorry drop both of these - broken one point perspective, don't show us this level of work.
Fantasy Background - nice, keep this!
Now fix the perspective and colour some of these!

Summary - good work, but need better perspective and colour backgrounds and most importantly you need stronger animation. The 2D Animation degree at Hertfordshire gets about 360 applicants a year and has about 30 places on it... so you need to make sure your work is as awesome as possible. If you want to watch a really good video (OK i made it, so I'm biased) which shows the level of artwork and type we need to see in a portfolio watch this:
https://vimeo.com/841286222

Most importantly don't give up - I don't want to have wasted 45 minutes writing the above, I have very little spare time as it is! Fix all the above and apply, and make us want to give you a place!