A Great Portfolio Is Not the Same as a Great Production Artist

A portfolio shows the work an artist is most proud of. Production reveals everything else.

Can the artist handle revisions, technical constraints, repeated tasks, and work that may never become a beautiful presentation piece? Can they make their ideas clear enough for the next person in the pipeline? Will they stay engaged after the exciting part is finished?

Kemp Remillard has worked across concept art, illustration, art direction, and teaching. His experience includes five years as an Associate Art Director at Funcom, concept work on Lair, and detailed illustrations for major Star Wars publications, including The Force Awakens: Incredible Cross-Sections.

In this interview, Kemp explains what separates an impressive portfolio from an artist a production team can genuinely rely on.

Main Topics

• Portfolio vs Production Artist
• Concept Art for Game Production
• Handling Feedback and Revisions
• Clear Visual Communication
• Art Direction and Teamwork
• Visual Direction for Small Game Studios
• Career Advice for Concept Artists

Interview

With Kemp Remillard, Art Director and Illustrator with 20+ Years Across Funcom, Star Wars, and Game Production

Q: A great portfolio is not the same as a great production artist. What is the difference?

A portfolio can show taste, technical skill, and strong ideas. But it cannot show everything about how someone works inside a real team.

What qualities only become visible after production begins?

What makes an art director realize that an artist can be trusted with the full project, not just one impressive assignment?

Ideally a strong portfolio would show the qualities you describe with a strong emphasis on an ability to solve problems. Of course it can be tricky determining how to present such an idea for non-veterans and students/beginners just starting their career.

How do I show that I’m a capable member of a production team? I want to show my best work only, and have been told to do so, but how do I demonstrate that I can take art direction and work well with others? These are all great questions to ask yourself when deciding what to show to potential clients and employers.

Consistency is one of the keys and exhibiting an ability to not only present fresh ideas at the beginning of the process but also be able to deal with the sometimes confusing and ever persistent… “changes”. Art Directors will always want the artist to elaborate on their ideas and oftentimes elaborate on their own. “These look great but this makes me think of this other thing and gives me more ideas, can you try to do some variations on XYZ? Here’s some more reference and also please provide your own”.

In other words, “looks great but start over”. In addition, the constraints of actual production, i.e. what can actually be used and implemented in the game or project, are ultimately the requirements for what your concepts have to achieve. This can be frustrating, tedious, and a sometimes limiting version of what you first conjured up at the beginning of the process. But! This is precisely what the job requires and breaking through these challenges is what makes for a great Concept Artist.

What an Art Director would look for in a portfolio in general and specifically for production is both the ability to bring fresh ideas to the table, but also the ability to work within a framework.

The work needs to look like it belongs in the world and the artist needs to exhibit the understanding that they can work together with a team of varying vocations towards a common goal. How does my design translate to 3D? How do I propose my design to animate? How does my design present fun potentials for the player? How does my environment design facilitate interesting game-play? What are the VFX callouts that are important to include? In other words, the work has to look like it would make, and fit the product. Most importantly it has to be cool and fun!

Ways to show this would be to present a ‘first phase’ of initial concepts, then variations on the theme. For example “Here was my initial idea, but here is the same character etc with more of an ornate treatment, or more of a refined simplistic treatment taking into consideration this new set of reference”. Presenting such variation on a theme would exhibit an ability to “roll with the punches” so to speak.

Exhibiting some nice and clear orthographic views (either front, side, back or front/back 2/3rds views) that are not lacking in details but also clear enough to be readily understood by the 3D artist. Maybe even some mods or variations on the ‘final’ concept, something that is important for the monetization of assets in games today.

Once that is all presented one could push their concepts further by demonstrating what fun game play opportunities are afforded by the concept. “Gimmicks” if you will. Add some fun animation sketches and callouts that make the viewer go “oh gee that’s cool”, that spark their imagination for the potential for fun. VFX are also a great detail to include and a feature that is often-times overlooked until production is underway.

Considering all of these aspects for inclusion in a portfolio is a guaranteed way to get the attention and interest of any Art Director or Lead. I will personally attest to this fact from experience that the key to a Director or Lead’s heart is to make your concepts look like they were well thought-out from the very start and would not require another artist or lead to clean it up themselves.

Q: Why do strong production artists spend so much time doing “boring” work?

Portfolios are filled with hero images, polished concepts, and dramatic presentations.

Real production also includes revisions, variations, callouts, cleanup, documentation, and tasks that may never be shown publicly.

Why is this less glamorous work so valuable to a team?

What happens when an artist enjoys the first exciting task but loses interest once the project needs patience, repetition, and consistency?

The “Boring” work is precisely what makes for a great project production and sets apart the Concept Artist from being an “Illustrator”. Illustrations are self contained images, meant to be presented as such. Concept Art serves the function of production, AKA “making the donuts”. The artwork needs to communicate the idea, efficiently, effectively, with clarity and conviction. This means making work that is more than just a mood or composition.

The word “high concept” gets bandied around sometimes and I’ve always felt this was more an excuse to not define or lock in on any singular idea. It’s all about showing the ideas! Additionally, I’ve always felt that making annotations and labels on the image (I always like to provide versions of my concepts with this) is a fantastic way to very quickly show that your thought process was and make absolutely certain that you are showing how you have thought about the things that you’ve put into your image.

As in my previous answer and like you said here, the job of being a good production Concept Artist will include lots of revisions, variations, callouts, polish, references, etc. This is all meant to show that you are essentially a visual problem solver that is able to think on their toes and provide real substance behind an image and not just make a pretty picture that is super well rendered with lots of inconsequential details.

The volume of details and rendering ability is not the thing, it is the QUALITY and CONTENT of the details and the rendering/process that is the valuable thing. Being able to efficiently create a picture that not only looks great but shows a depth of background thinking in the process is the best kind there is for helping the larger production team. Doing research and telling stories, while keeping in mind how your concept fits within the IP and the technical limitations is the sweet spot.

If an artist seems to lose interest after their first offering or gets frustrated easily by criticism, then this artist is probably not long to be kept on the team much less the job. Believe me, I had to learn this the hard way. You may think your art direction given is bad, confusing, or dumb, but this is the job! The ability to take someone else’s ideas and make them cool will make you a conceptual super hero if you can learn to discipline your internal monologue.

That’s not to say you should not have opinions, on the contrary! It’s a very good thing to have your own tastes and instincts, having these is what you were hired for. The key is to channel those natural and intuitive things that made you a great artist with your personal work into an ever increasingly (sometimes difficult) framework.

Sometimes it can feel like you are getting boxed in with too many limitations or outside opinions from Directors and Leads, but it is the best feeling in the world to be able to take this frustrating puzzle and arrive on something that actually works! If you keep at it, the final “approved” at the end of the tunnel can be the most rewarding thing for a Concept Artist to enjoy in their career.

Q: Your Star Wars cross-section illustrations contain an extraordinary amount of technical detail. How do you make complexity clear instead of overwhelming?

A detailed image can look impressive while still being difficult for another person to understand.

How do you decide what needs to be designed, explained, simplified, or removed?

What can concept artists learn from this when preparing work for 3D artists, animators, and other departments?

I appreciate the compliment and that’s a great question. I see a lot of concept designs that look absolutely fantastic with the shear amount of detail that is offered but find them sometimes hard to look at and understand. I’m a firm believer that the eye needs areas to ‘rest’ and ways to visually organize the information your brain is taking in. This is a fundamental of picture making in general but also specifically an issue with techy sci-fi stuff.

What is too much? What is too little? There’s no firm answer to this but it means that it’s very helpful to be constantly stepping away and asking yourself “would someone really understand what’s going on here if they hadn’t been staring at it for 1000 hours?”. It really cannot hurt and in fact helps to get a second or third pair of eyes on something and get an honest critique from a trusted source.

I’ve done lots of concepts in the past where I thought something looked super cool and found that a friend or colleague interpreted it a totally different and unintended way. If you can identify what parts of your concept are particularly confusing, there is always a way to change or refine it so that it really “hits you over the head” with what you’re trying to achieve in a particular area.
Say for example, “does this particular mech joint look like it hinges the way it’s supposed to?”, “Does this engine thingy come across to the viewer as an engine?”.

The Star Wars: Incredible Cross Sections books were such a fantastic delight to work on and the good people at DK and Lucas Film really gave me a lot of leeway in how I would compose the images and display the tech. Since Star Wars is first and foremost a story I wanted to try and achieve this same sense of telling a story through details in a similar fashion as movie making. Movies are one of the best examples of directing the eyes of the viewer in order to weave a narrative.

That’s not to say that details are not awesome, only that it’s important to recognize ‘how’ they are being used and make sure they are not turning your concept into a giant busy visual salad. It is an unfortunate fact that some non-art people sometimes mistake not having your concept encrusted with details means it’s not as good. Don’t listen to this!

Instead think about the distribution of the details and ways to put lots of details in certain areas while letting other areas ‘breath’. My Cross Sections were actual ‘Illustrations’, so I needed to be especially aware of what the primary, secondary, and tertiary elements were in order to guide the viewers eye and get them to notice a first set of things before another.

This is a primary art lesson in composition for painting and picture making in general. So knowing your art history and what makes a great painting can and does still have everything to do with making a cool-ass image of spaceships engines or a badass robot with giant guns.

If you have particular concept designs or images that you enjoy, it’s great to just look at them through this lens of “how is this organized?” And “why do I find this so appealing compared to this other concept / image?” It’s all about the presentation in the end.

Q: How can an art director tell whether an artist is solving the problem or simply making the image more impressive?

Young artists are often encouraged to add more detail, stronger lighting, and a more cinematic presentation.

But production may need a simpler answer that the rest of the team can use immediately.

How do you recognize when a beautiful image is hiding an unclear design?

When should an artist stop polishing and start communicating?

At the end of the day the viewers of your image have to be able to tell what’s going on and what the things in said image look like. Like I said above, more detail does not mean ‘more impressive’ and especially more crazy VFX and/or blown out lighting will only further confuse what the contents hold.

It is 100% desirable to make your concepts as beautiful and appealing as possible. But it is more important that the artwork is CLEAR, visually understandable and substantive. If the artist is hiding behind too man pretty lights, shiny materials, stylization and atmosphere, then the artwork is no long production concept art and basically becoming an illustration.

There is a special particular place for ‘mood art’, but this should ideally be just a small tool in the concept artists toolkit. Think of that as a quick sketch or appetizer before the main course. You can’t make a meal out of popcorn or a song out of a guitar solo!

Lastly, if you spend a million hours rendering on what you think is a cool concept and it’s an instant “no” upon showing to your Lead or Director, then you’ve just wasted a bunch of time and money! ;D.

It should also be noted that if you feel that you have a particular “style”, and that you are unable to deviate from this “style”, then you probably do not belong on a game project unless the project itself is built around “your style”. Let me tell you, this is quite rare and you better have the best damn “style” there is for someone to pay you lots of money to just work that way alone.

Being adaptive, inquisitive, versatile and cooperative makes the concept artist a cornerstone and key contributor to any project and invaluable member of the team. Stylization can be great fun and lots of games are built on this as a theme in the core “style guide”, but the artist needs to be able to understand how to fit that determined stylization, or sell the idea of a stylization based on specifics.

Employers are not interested in hearing “well this is my style”. I’ve heard this way too much from aspiring artists over the years and ultimately concluded this is more of psychological excuse to not want to learn and grow as an artist.
Having your own voice and working methods as an artist is of course a wonderful thing and I strongly encourage that every artist does. It’s just important to make your approache an asset and not a hinderance if your desire is to be a versatile Concept Artist for hire.

Q: How Do Strong Artists Handle a Direction They Disagree With?

Sometimes the client, creative director, or team chooses a direction an artist would not choose personally.

What separates healthy disagreement from ego?

Can professional maturity mean helping turn an unwanted direction into the strongest possible result?

Is this one of the qualities that shows someone is ready to lead other artists?
What other qualities should an artist develop before moving into a lead or art director role?

This is a great question. I would say that most of the time direction does not go the way you’d choose as an artist, even if you’re a Lead or AD! Like I said previously, there are so many factors that go into determining what the final asset will look like in a game.

Being a Concept Artist on a big project can sometimes seem like a contradiction. You are asked to come up with wonderful and fantastical ideas, then see your vision critiqued, crushed and ground into dirt by committee or differing tastes. All the while doing it with a smile and remembering that you are providing your concept skills as a service to fit into someone else’s vision. I’m joking of course! 😀 But sometimes it can feel that way on your worst days.

The contradiction is that you are being employed to be creative and “think outside of the box” while also instructed to “think very much inside the box”.

Healthy disagreement does have a place and can sometimes be helpful in order to properly convey your idea, because as I said previously sometimes it is not so clear or understood how cool or better your idea might be from your artwork alone. It helps to understand how to respectfully disagree and have a civil conversation with your Lead or AD in order to foster a better understanding.

Where this becomes toxic and the opposite of useful is precisely this, if your ego gets involved. If you make it personal and get emotions involved it can paint a pictures of you as the artist being someone that is unable to work with a team and essentially unemployable.

In other words, don’t forget that this is a job and you’re getting paid to draw, paint and concept things! It’s a good thing! I will humbly say I learned this the hard way at times when I was younger. Having a passion for the craft is a special thing to have, but don’t let it cloud your judgment and keep in perspective what the ultimate goal is.

If you don’t want to take art direction then you can always draw your own stuff after hours ;). Trust me sometimes this helps and is actually a very healthy way to blow off steam from a sometimes stressful work experience.

Professional maturity does indeed mean turning unwanted art direction into the strongest possible result. Like I stated above, even if you strongly disagree with what you’re instructed to do it can be the best feeling in the world to make it out to the other side and get the coveted “approved” status for your final concept.

The alternative is that your concept gets taken and given to someone else who can finish the job and trust me, that’s actually the worst feeling in the world. You are being employed to be a visual and conceptual problem solver.

So looking at what can sometimes feel like weird or confusing art direction and turning it into something great means you’ve solved one of the hardest puzzles there is. Seeing direction and revisions like a game or dance is a great way to keep your ego in check and just continue to have fun with the work.

Having the right attitude can mean a world of difference between enjoying your job or being miserable, so choose wisely my friend!

Having these qualities and the right attitude is indeed what shows that an artist is ready to lead other artists. It’s so tremendously useful for a Lead or Director to understand what the experience of taking direction is like and cultivating a method of fostering collaboration and guidance while being assertive about what the goal they are trying to achieve is.

Proper communication is the absolute key for an artist to understand if they wish to move into a Lead or Director role. Throughout my career I have at times been incredibly frustrated by what I perceived as confusing or indecisive art direction.

It is absolutely paramount to be able to clearly, concisely and purposefully communicate your idea to the artist you are giving instruction to. And if you don’t have an answer for everything it’s ok to say you don’t.

When I brief an artist on any particular task I like to be very clear about what the big requirements are, what I think I’d like to see, what I suggest they might pursue and what I really don’t have an answer for and would like to see them help me come up with a solution for.

For Small Game Studios

Can a small studio define the visual direction of a game in just 40 hours?

A small team may have an idea for the game but no clear visual language yet.

What can realistically be achieved in one working week?

Is a moodboard enough to align the team, or does it also need key art, style tests, shape language, colour rules, and examples of how the game should actually look?

When is referencing another game useful, and when does it only hide the fact that the team has not made its own visual decisions?

What should those 40 hours produce so the team can move forward with confidence?

I absolutely think a small studio can achieve a visual direction within a week. It would require a substantial amount of trust among the team members to allow an artist or small group of artists to have creative control over what that might be. The team members need to trust the creatives to make good decisions.

So much of what I’ve observed and experienced in the game industry that slows the process down is second guessing, hand wringing and reversals. It’s a very difficult thing to commit to a decision because you are placing your bet on the success or failure of said decision.

When it comes to artistic and stylistic choices, those decisions can take such a vast array of paths and approaches that it can be dizzying to attempt to feel good about what might be the right choice.

Additionally, when it comes to art, I find that quite a lot of people who do not make the actual art have very strong opinions about what it should be without the language to properly describe their conviction. Defining roles and respecting each other’s fields of expertise can be a great way for a lean team to make great progress quickly.

I think mood boards and an abundance of reference are a big necessity. Personally I always look to the real world first because I’m a strong believer that truth is stranger than fiction and that the natural world we live in has such a complex and vast wealth of interest.

Obscure history can be such a great resource for finding stuff like weird costumes, cultures, vehicles, buildings, environments, scenarios, etc. There is so much out there from the human experience that would make for amazing games and settings. Building and pushing into the fantastical things we find in the real world is part of why I love this job so much.

With that said of course parameters for what sets the “style”, “shape language”, etc need to be defined, but it only needs to be a framework to allow for creativity. I do think sometimes these topics are over-thought and can become constraining.

Loose frameworks like “this character set has angular shapes and this character set has organic shapes” works just fine to get things started and setup further refined established parameters.

Finding examples of how the game should actually look is helpful in terms of setting quality targets. In these terms it can be very helpful to reference other games and properties as an aspirational goal post. Inspiration from other artists, artworks and productions is a wonderful and necessary thing. Good art does not exist in a vacuum.

The danger in leaning too heavily into referencing other games, I’d say, is that if you truly want to make something awesome you do not want to simply copy something that is already awesome. A teacher once told me something I always like to remember: “bad artists copy, great artists borrow”. I think this is true across all of art throughout human history.

Simply put, if you have a small team on a tight budget and schedule, take a chance! Don’t be afraid to place a bet on trusting your instincts, coming up with a plan, and sticking to it.

For Young Artists

How do you stay useful when the task is not exciting?

Young artists often imagine their careers through hero pieces, characters, vehicles, and finished illustrations.

Real production may ask for ten variations, cleanup, callouts, corrections, or work that will never appear in a portfolio.

How do you maintain the same level of care when the task feels repetitive or unimportant?

What helps an artist build the patience and reliability that production teams actually remember?

I’ve done plenty of jobs along the way that were, shall we say, less than exciting. Once I did some very tedious UI work for an ancient online meeting room game based on a reality show that made me question my life choices.
I’ve made brochures and logos for home subdivisions and contracting companies. When I was younger I made vinyl signs for all kinds of small businesses in high school at a print shop. One of my first jobs was making websites for various university departments.

When I didn’t have work for periods of time at Massive Black I doubled down on re-vamping the branding for the company until something came in.
Make yourself indispensable. Find your joy in problem solving and savor the flavor when it’s solving a problem you actually enjoy ( hero pieces, characters, vehicles, illustrations etc).

Once you eat all of your vegetables you get desert! I’m a firm believer that if you grind past the more menial tasks in life and excel at the ones you enjoy you just might find yourself only doing the jobs you want in the future.