Portfolio Guidelines

Jack McGrath, Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) and Master of Fine Arts graduate.

Preparing a Portfolio

Consider your portfolio a transcript of your artistic skills and experience. Preparing a portfolio requires careful consideration of which pieces are going to effectively demonstrate your ideas and skills. The portfolio weighs heavily in determining your acceptance or rejection into the degree.

Assess your current work and get an opinion early. If you don’t have work yet, or feel that your work is not strong enough, there is still time. Ask for advice from a high school art teacher, or other art professional. They can review your finished work or works in progress, your sketchbooks and visual arts diary and give you tips on the kinds of work to include as well as how to make your work look stronger. Your portfolio does not have to contain work relevant to the studio you hope to enter, e.g. you may wish to study in the SCA glass studio but we would not necessarily expect your portfolio to contain examples of glass artwork.

Select work which is relevant and representative of your artistic and philosophical interests. Take out your older works if they look weaker than your more recent work. Make sure you include work created from observation. We understand that some applicants had greater opportunities to produce a body of relevant work for the portfolio presentation.

Requirements

We encourage you to present your portfolio at an interview. You can also choose to send it electronically or deliver a hard copy to SCA. If sending electronically, the maximum file size for each document or compressed file upload is 5MB.

Please bring up to 10 examples of your work in one of the following formats:

• actual examples of your work
• digital photographs of your work (JPG or PDF)
• page layouts, illustration, digital photography (JPG or PDF)
• excerpts of film, animation or digital video work (.MOV)
• showreel or excerpts of film or digital video work (.MOV)
• website or other dedicated site such as a Vimeo channel (please bring the site address in a Word or PDF document)

If you create work in series select some of the series to present.

Include a variety of work and where possible experiment with different media. If you are a recent school leaver you should also bring your visual arts diary. You may also wish to include a written reference from someone who is familiar with your artwork, for example your art teacher.

Please contact SCA Administration on (02) 9351 1104 or send an email to for further information.