Featured Pro Portfolio: Sandra Duchiewicz
Sandra Duchiewicz is a London-based concept artist and illustrator who specializes in fantasy creatures and characters. Her credits include the Total War: Warhammer trilogy, Deathloop and Trials of Fire.
Check out Sandra’s ArtStation-powered portfolio website.
How did you get your first professional job?
I studied at place that didn’t respect digital mediums. They considered concept art and mainstream illustration as a lower type of art – “commercial art” compared to contemporary high gallery art. So I understood pretty early that in order for me to break into entertainment industry, I would need to work on my portfolio alone and in my spare time between university assignments.
I found a bunch of cool people online with whom I started to collaborate. At first, it was on amateur game projects, then on indie games and later at start up companies making card games. All of these projects eventually got cancelled but they did help me to create a body of work that later became the core of my portfolio. Thanks to that early work, I started working for Fantasy Flight Games and Paizo. Eventually after almost two years of freelance grind, this portfolio got me a full time position at Creative Assembly.
What do you think is one of the largest obstacles for artists today?
A couple years ago, I would say that competition was biggest challenge. Concept art became some sort of a”hot job” in the industry. Aspiring artists are gaining knowledge much faster than the previous generations thanks to easier access to learning materials. But if you know where to look, you will see there’s a huge number of job positions that are appearing everyday around the world. The main obstacle for artists to actually get hired is not the competition but being open to relocation.
Another challenge I see is the rise of internet art celebrities. Some people are drawn to this industry not because they want to create good art, but because they want to be famous and loved. They think that being famous is somehow a golden ticket to get showered with job offers. These people focus too much on becoming famous instead of becoming useful in the production pipeline. Social media has a huge influence over how people are portraying themselves.
I’ve been mentoring students that feel like they are not good enough because they don’t have a certain amount of followers on social media. Some of them are not present online at all because they are scared of being judged and compared to other more established artists. It’s heartbreaking to think that young aspiring artists are evaluating themselves in these kind of merits. They are literally competing with everybody else for the crowd attention from such early stages of their careers.
What do you do to promote your work and get jobs?
I believe that social media presence does not represent if you are professional or not. It’s usually just a metric to see how popular and mainstream your ideas are. I do not depend on it in order to find projects to work on. There are a bunch of other tools that I use and that I always recommend to friends and students:
- LinkedIn (that I joke: is more useful than your diploma)
- Glassdoor (to see what companies are like before applying to work for them)
- Kotaku and RockPaperShotgun (to be up to date with industry current events, acquisitions, game releases, announcements and trends)
- Gaming job lists like gamedevmap.com or GameDevJobList put together by Mitch Dyer.
Most of my recent projects I got directly through LinkedIn, ArtStation and networking with Art Directors at industry events. Connections like that are much more valuable than social media followers in terms of gaining job offers and career progression.
Tell us the story behind one of your favourite pieces in your portfolio.
Before this one, I was always super conscious of rendering everything to a high polish. I really love this loose style but my clients prefer more defined and polished designs. I guess it doesn’t really work as a portfolio piece if none of my clients want art like that from me but it was still a little milestone in my approach to art. In the future, I hope I can find time to do more art like this!
See more of Sandra’s work on her portfolio website. Find out more about ArtStation Pro websites here.
