Artistic Counseling

Every Picture Tells a Story

When applying to art and design programs for college and graduate school, you’ll need to develop an art and design portfolio. This creative body of work must visually demonstrate your unique skills, opinions, and personality while showcasing why you deserve a spot at the colleges you’re targeting. Achieving these objectives is challenging — but we provide Artistic Counseling to help make this creative step of your college application process easier to navigate.

What You Can Expect

Our Artistic Counseling service is best if you only need support developing the creative elements required in the application process. For this service, we provide the following:

• Exploration of student interests, skills, and abilities
• Review and evaluation of current portfolio/artwork
• Examination of degree programs and majors
• Targeted best-fit college list development
• Structured process and portfolio development and content editing
• Assignment and critiques of projects to enhance and build portfolio content
• In-depth review of college-specific requirements (including supplemental visual assignments)
• Strategies for showcasing strengths to exceed requirements
• Maximizing portfolio for multiple applications
• Preparation of artist’s statements and creative resume
• Labeling, identification, and inventory of artwork
• Technical considerations: photography, digitization
• Recommendations for attending National Portfolio Day events
• Best practices for prospective professional artists
• Extra- or co-curricular arts education
• Pre-College summer art programs
• SlideRoom and Common Application supplement submission

Depending on your needs, we’ll customize your Artistic Counseling plan to achieve your specific goals.

One-On-One Guidance

Our team of Portfolio Advisors has extensive art and design backgrounds. To ensure you develop unique portfolio pieces you’re confident submitting to colleges, you’ll receive one-on-one counseling from a Portfolio Advisor who best matches your needs, skills, and goals.

Early in the portfolio development process, your Portfolio Advisor will:

• Meet with you to understand your artistic goals
• Ask you to share your work to review
• Evaluate your artwork, including your drafts, sketches, and completed pieces
• Determine your artistic strengths
• Identify areas for clarifying and elevating your artistic practice

As you develop a working relationship, your Portfolio Advisor will:

• Guide you in cultivating your unique artistic style
• Assist you in brainstorming new pieces to include in your final portfolios
• Help align your portfolio with the requirements for each college on your list
• Support you in writing descriptions of your artwork to ensure context for each piece.

Get Personalized Advice

Contact us to discover more about how we can assist you in developing an engaging portfolio. We offer a complimentary 20-minute consultation to introduce ourselves, discuss our Artistic Counseling service, and learn about your unique objectives.

Get in touch using our contact form.