Portfolio advice for Concept Art & IP Development MA

Portfolio requirements

If you have applied to study Concept Art & IP Development MA at UCA, you’ll be able to upload your portfolio via our Applicant Portal.  

For your portfolio, please provide at least 30 pages of slides that showcases your skills in the key areas listed below, focusing on turning design ability into a structured creative world in addition to key skills in concept art and design. 

• Skill and Technical Foundation: you should demonstrate solid design structure and visual communication skills, ideally across at least two media (e.g. 2D concept and 3D blockout).
• Conceptual Thinking and World Logic: Portfolios should evidence the ability to build or expand an original IP — covering at least two of three key design areas (character designs, environment art, prop designs). The emphasis is on concept-driven design, not only polished visuals.
• Research and Individual Direction: Work should include evidence of research, iteration, and personal authorship — showing how the applicant translates ideas into a cohesive visual narrative or system.

Technical specifications

Your work should be primarily digital, including both 2D and 3D art and design. If you are presenting traditional work, this should be scanned at a good quality, 200dpi (dots/pixels per inch) minimum.

Your work must be arranged into one PDF format portfolio document. This can easily be done online within Google Slides and exported as a PDF if you don’t have access to Adobe Acrobat or similar PDF creation software.

Your portfolio should be in a screen-friendly landscape format.

Use of AI 

Your portfolio must contain your own work. We understand that some of your portfolio may include work created in part or whole by AI. You must acknowledge this by adding ‘AI generated’ to the relevant section(s), stating how you used AI to create images, and adding a link to the original image with the date it was created (where possible).