Nicolas Weis is a Concept artist with over ten years of experience working mostly in animation. He had the opportunity to work on major franchises such as Astroboy, The Croods, How to train your Dragon and Sonic the Hedgehog. He has been an online mentor since 2015.

The mentor and mentee will meet weekly through webcams for an hour and communicate through email in between sessions.

We will assess together what you need to build a coherent and efficient portfolio. It should combine powerful concepts, striking visuals, and the right balance of variety.

Candidate selection

“This mentorship is not about teaching the basics of fundamentals techniques, you’ll have to have a fair understanding of drawing, composition, color.

This also means you need to come up with a concept for your project, with some basic core ideas regarding the rules and logic of the world you want your project to take place into. You’ll also have to present the main characters of your story. Even though this is not meant to be a character design mentorship, the images will always feature them.

Learning all that would obviously take more than ten hours and would not fit the format of this mentorship. The more you give me to work with, the more I’ll be able to give back, I am looking for motivated and dedicated students to work with. Ten weeks is not a lot to cover all the ground we’ll have to explore, so be prepared to work hard.

I won’t be able to take several mentees at once so I’ll select only candidate that meet these criteria.” – Nicolas Weis

Limited Seats only Available under Invitation

Program

Week 1 : introduction

This first contact is meant to layout the schedule in front of us:

– Assessing your project, the strengths and weaknesses of your current portfolio

– A pitch of your project in your own words : what is the world, who are the main characters and what is the basic story. This will help us to define the three pieces you’ll work on during the mentorship. They will need to be strong individually and different enough to present a good variety.

– A detailed assignment regarding the first image

Week 2-9 :

Every week you will receive

– A one hour webcam conversation centered around the feedback of last week’s assignment
– An assignment for the upcoming week based on your progress
– Help through email if you struggle with a specific part of the assignment

Week 10 : wrapping up

I’ll share with you tips to put together and present your portfolio in a clear and efficient manner. We’ll also talk about the best way to put it on the world map to get noticed.

 

Limited Seats only Available under Invitation