AP Art …What I Wish I Knew Before I Started My Portfolio

By: Ananya Chittibabu 

Advice for people that want to take AP art in the next school year and I want to get started on their portfolio during the summer. 

You can sign up for two different AP art courses: AP drawing and AP 2-D design. I chose to do AP 2-D design because it gave me more flexibility with different mediums, I could have some pieces in digital art and some in traditional, and I could create collages.

First, I would advise you to figure out what you want your sustained investigation (your portfolio) to be about as quickly as possible. Creating 12-15 pieces is a lot and can take a very long time, and you don’t want to rush trying to create new pieces at the end. When picking a topic, you should be able to come up with at least five different piece ideas; if you can’t do that in the beginning, it might become harder to come up with pieces later on. The first topic I chose, which I eventually ended up scrapping, was one where I could barely get through the first piece because I couldn’t picture what I wanted to do with the portfolio. Because they won’t be as good as the rest of your pieces, I know I underestimated how long it would take. So figure out your topic and start producing pieces as fast as you can. And make sure you pace yourself, don’t spend too much time on one piece because you can always come back to it later; I spent almost a month on one piece, which I wouldn’t recommend doing because I lost a lot of time that I could have been working on other pieces. But also, at the same time, don’t rush a piece. I would say 2-3 weeks is the maximum time that should be spent on a piece. When deciding what pieces I wanted to create, I started by jotting down ideas, and then I would create thumbnails and then go from there. Always create multiple thumbnails. I promise they will help you more than you realize. They allow you to see how your work would look in different ways without having to actually create something you don’t like. 

I would like to mention how important staying on topic is. DO NOT stray away from your topic in the middle of your portfolio. It will not be good, and it’ll hurt the overall grade you get from the college board. Make sure you pick a topic you are interested in and create pieces in. It shouldn’t be a topic where you run out of ideas once you get to piece six. But keep in mind your portfolio can be about literally anything. It doesn’t have to be a very deep portfolio. I know someone who created a portfolio about babies and idioms. So just pick anything you want. Just make sure you can come up with enough pieces.

The main point of this article is to manage your time wisely and have fun creating your portfolio, even though it may not seem like fun towards the end (I know I was exhausted). Don’t stress yourself out too much about just trying your best and putting your best work forward, and if you don’t do great, it’s not the end of the world.