Art Making Portfolio

What is the Art Making Portfolio?

This task is for SL students and focuses on how you use art-making to explore and investigate ideas.

You’ll choose and organize visual evidence that shows your personal research, discoveries, and artwork. This should be supported with your own written reflections, all put together in a portfolio. Your portfolio should clearly show how you use different art-making methods and creative approaches to explore your ideas.

Your portfolio needs to show how you developed and improved your own visual style through one or more lines of inquiry. Be sure to include the inquiry questions or guiding statements that helped shape your process.

As an SL student, you must submit two files:

A PDF file with up to 15 screens. This should include your visual evidence and writing. Altogether, your writing must not go over 3,000 words.
A separate text file listing all the sources you used.

What This Task Is About

In this portfolio, you will show how you explore ideas through your art-making. You’ll select and organize images and written reflections that show your personal investigations, discoveries, creative processes, and final outcomes. You'll also explain how you used different materials, techniques, and strategies to shape and improve your visual style, all guided by your artistic intentions.

There’s no set way to make your artwork, you can develop your ideas through many creative paths, including trial and error, unexpected discoveries, and flexible processes. Your job is to present clear evidence of how you investigated, experimented, explored, and refined your work using one or more lines of inquiry.

What’s a “Line of Inquiry”?

A line of inquiry is a guiding idea or question that shapes your art-making. In your portfolio, you need to clearly state your inquiry question(s) or generative statement(s). These will help organize your work and show how your thinking developed over time.

Your portfolio should include both visuals and writing that explain how you explored your inquiry and met your artistic goals. You’ll also show how you experimented with different creative approaches and learned from the work of other artists.

What You Need to Submit

You must submit two files:

One PDF file with up to 15 screens that includes images and short pieces of writing (no more than 3,000 words total). You must state your exact word count in your portfolio.
One separate text file listing the sources you used.

Your PDF should include a wide variety of art-making forms and creative strategies. Try to show both depth and breadth in your work.

Make sure your inquiry questions or generative statements are clearly included and used to organize your portfolio. Your goal is to show how you thought creatively, explored ideas, and refined your work over time.

Main Goals of the Portfolio (Assessment Focus)

1. Investigate

Show how you researched, explored, and experimented with:

Different art forms, materials, and techniques
Creative strategies used by you and other artists
Visual language like symbols, motifs, or composition
Ways of looking at and responding to the world

Your work should show how your investigations were guided by your artistic goals.

2. Generate

Show how you came up with ideas and developed them through your creative process. Use your inquiry questions or generative statements to help structure your portfolio. You might include:

Mind maps, sketches, and brainstorming notes
Experimentation and “failed” ideas that led to new ones
Images, resources, or inspirations that supported your thinking
How your work changed and grew over time

3. Refine

Show how you reviewed and improved your work through reflection, feedback, and problem-solving. You can include:

Before-and-after images that show changes
Notes on what worked and what didn’t
Responses to critiques and how you adjusted your work
Evidence of thoughtful improvement in both materials and ideas

4. Curate

Organize your images and writing in a clear, meaningful way. This includes:

Choosing what to include (and what to leave out)
Arranging images to show progress, connections, or contrasts
Using accurate, art-specific vocabulary
Making your writing short, clear, and purposeful

Tips for Compiling Your Portfolio

Wait until Year 2 of the course to begin compiling your final portfolio, so you have plenty of work to choose from.
Pull your best visual and written materials from your Visual Arts Journal and your finished or in-progress artworks.
Make sure your inquiry questions or generative statements are clearly written in your portfolio.
Organize your work to show how your ideas developed and how your visual language evolved.
Use short, focused writing to support your images, bullet points and short paragraphs work better than long blocks of text.

Using Your Visual Arts Journal

Your journal is a key resource. Select things like:

Sketches, experiments, planning pages
Notes, reflections, and research
Photos of screenshots that show progress

You might discover lines of inquiry that naturally emerged during your art-making, even if you didn’t plan them from the start. Written notes or reflections from your journal can be added to your portfolio to support your visuals

Designing Your Portfolio Screens

You’ll submit your portfolio as a digital PDF with up to 15 screens.
Each screen should be clearly designed, easy to read, and not overcrowded.
Use short texts, bullet points, and annotations, aim for no more than 250 words per screen.
Screens can include:
- Direct scans of your journal
- Edited pages that combine images and typed text
- Sketches, photos, and screenshots

Use a horizontal layout and make sure everything is high-resolution and legible. Poor quality or messy screens will affect how well your work is understood and assessed.