Work Catalog Log #1

For whatever reason, I find it so difficult to wrap my head around the presentation of my work on a professional level. It's not really a case of me not understanding what it is that I'm capable of, or how to categorise the work I've made so far, it's more so the struggle of displaying it in a cohesive, comprehensible manner, but in a way where it would not kill the personality or integrity behind the work. 

I've poured so much time and energy into figuring out what I want the base of my branding to look, and my art style has evolved quite a bit alongside this development. So, on paper, it shouldn't be that difficult to put the two together and have an effective portfolio website that I could share and represent myself with, however, for some strange reason, that's just not the case.

Over the course of the past 3 years or so, I've been on a journey to get my website up and running, and, for the most part, I'm very satisfied with the stage of development that I'm currently at. Been working more on it some more recently; adding new little assets here and there, reworking the pages, the text, configuring some of the HTML elements, generally just updating it to be more functional and presentable. However, for the life of me, I cannot seem to bring myself to actually get my work up there; it almost feels as though I'm doing everything else just to avoid that stage of building my portfolio, which is ironic, considering that's the meat and bones of what I'm trying to achieve.

Recently, I figured it could be beneficial to use the wayback machine to try and see what the evolution of my website looks like, and, it's pretty apparent that I've had this particular struggle since the inception of the project. I've never gotten to having a complete or somewhat finalised display of work on any of the renditions. Each capture just displayed a collection of placeholder images that I remember vividly having there with the intent of updating them once I had expanded my work library some more. 

I've gotten to the stage of developing my website, where all that's really left to do is the catalog of work as well as a first-impression-style general display on the front page. I've given doing so a few shots in the last month - all of them ending up being rather fruitless, unfortunately. Each time I'd just play around with the positioning and the spacing of the images that I have set up as placeholders but then would log off immediately after as it would start to stress me out a bit. YouTube tutorials were a resort, I came across quite a few that were informative and gave me a better sense of understanding, or so it seemed, as the moment I went back to editing my website, my mind would just go blank again, I'd flip around the positioning, change some text sometimes and then log off again.

Where the issue lies, I've come to realise, is in the fact that I don't feel particularly secure in the work that I've accumulated so far. Not to say it's bad in any way, I'm very fond of where I'm at creatively, the work I've done in the past couple of years has aged really well, not a single piece I would leave out of my personal catalog. However, that's what the problem is - it's a lot of personal work that is hard to present as professional work. 

My art, as it stands, showcases how expansive and refined my skillset is, it shows that I've got a great taste, a strong style, medium flexibility, understanding of shapes and colour, a very good library of interests and references to integrate into my work. However, in a professional sense, it's not easy to sell. A portfolio website serves as a port for attracting work and clients, but when that "port" has no dock to berth at, there's going to be no traction.

I think to get over this stress that I experience every time I try to work on my work catalog, I need to bite the bullet and actually get some professional illustration work done. There's just no easy means of landing these opportunities when you don't have a steady foundation set up, so I think for the time being I'll have to make some mockup work and hope that leads to something someday. 2026 is the year where I said I'd start taking illustration, and art in general, more seriously, therefore this could be a good starting point. Keeping my fingers crossed, more on it later!