Applying to art schools, students not only have to meet the academic requirements, but they also create a practical art portfolio to showcase technical, creative, and conceptual abilities with admission officers. Admission to prestigious art schools in America for competitive, for example, RISD’s acceptance rate is only 23%. For most university art majors and art schools, your art portfolio will play a decisive and critical role in the admission process.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the admissions officer understands applicants through the portfolio, because it represents your creativity, personality, and potential. Therefore, a good portfolio must be able to speak for itself and communicate effectively with admissions officers.
So, how should an art portfolio be prepared? Today, we invite Catherine, a Rhode Island School of Design professor, to give you some 3 awesome art portfolio ideas based on a theme! She’s currently teaching our Art Portfolio Preparation program here at Aralia Education Technology, where students have carried out a research, design, and final presentation of their works with the “Mask and Identity” theme.
Mask and Identity Theme Research
After receiving the theme, you must first conduct research on the theme, understand the works of the artists, and draw your own unique thoughts and ideas.
Idea 1: Wire sculpture production
After the research stage, Catherine pushed the students one step further to work with wire material. Through the exercises of dynamic and linear sculpture, students can understand the meaning of the theme from another dimension and expand their thinking.
Idea 2: Self-portrait Research
After the research stage, Catherine pushed the students one step further to work with wire material. Through the exercises of dynamic and linear sculpture, students can understand the meaning of the theme from another dimension and expand their thinking.
Idea 3: Mask-making
Students’ interpretations on the “mask” works.
Some of these works are excellent works of students in the art portfolio preparation program of Professor Catherine. Catherine integrates drawing exercises, artwork critic, mind mapping, and teacher and student evaluation. By the end of the course, the students will integrate all the works to make their own collection of artworks, which will be used in university applications.
Catherine’s thorough and practical instruction is appreciated by all the students!
I really enjoy building my portfolio under the guidance of Catherine. She covered many aspects of art and helped me explore more ideas in my works. And because she is a professor from RISD, her perspectives are very practical and valuable for a student. I have gained so much knowledge from this course. The professor provided a lot of important RISD admission information to us and really pushed us creatively. I will practice more after I finish this course, and hopefully, I can get into my dream school.
Aralia's Courses
For this course, students will conduct a series of painting, design, and three-dimensional design projects. Students have a chance to improve their creative research and material experiment abilities, and finally create an electronic art portfolio.
In the first few lessons, students will focus on observational painting training. They will discuss and study the works of famous artists to increase their knowledge of art and visual culture; students will also examine and do mask-making exercises. The focus of this course is on expressing movements, lines, contours, patterns, and the composition of negative and positive spaces to create patterns and shapes. In the final project, students will explore “Mask and Identity”. During the course, the works created by the students will be photographed and recorded, which will be used in the production of their electronic portfolio.
