AP Portfolio Guide
Hello students. Here are my thoughts on many common questions and concerns regarding the AP Studio portfolio. Most of these topics are addressed in the official documentation provided by College Board. I highly encourage that you read the official Course and Exam Description first. Afterwards, you can read this for my own personal thoughts.
What Is Being Evaluated?
Reading over the official documents, you may notice 6 words appear consistently throughout: experimentation, revision, practice, materials, processes, and ideas.
The first three words regard the mind. The graders want to know if you are doing these mental processes in your head: experimenting, revising, practicing. They want to know you are doing it well. For example, there are better and worse forms of experimentation. If you did one piece in colored pencil, and you came in the next day and told me you wanted to do the next one in crayon, if I asked, “Why?” and you said, “I dunno,” I would be pretty displeased, and I know the graders won’t think highly of it either.
The last three words, materials, processes, and ideas, you can think of as the evidence of your thinking. Of course, in the most literal sense, the graders’ only evidence of your thinking is the uploaded images and the various annotations and short answer writing you provide. So what do I mean? I mean that when you breakdown the artmaking process, you can split it into three parts:
- Ideas This is your goal, intent, and whatever motivations that are driving the piece.
- Materials This is what you decide to make the piece with.
- Processes This is how you put the materials together to convey your idea.
When the three forms of evidence work together to show your practice, experimentation, and revision, the College Board calls this synthesis. Simply put, you must always have goals attached to your artworks, and your thinking must be about how to best attain those goals. Every time an idea changes, your materials and processes change to match. Why do ideas change? Because you are experimenting, revising, and practicing…
What Do I Have To Do?
Your score for the AP portfolio is entirely decided by your online digital submission. The submission deadline will be at some time in early May. However, students may start uploading their work beginning around November.
The digital portfolio is separated into 2 categories, Sustained Investigation and Selected Works. You will need to upload a total of 20 images for the 2-D and Drawing or 25 images for the 3-D portfolio. Every image will require students to provide extra information, such as the size, materials used, processes used, and ideas applied. Additionally, for the Sustained Investigation section, students are required to write 2 responses.
- Sustained Investigation. Students are required to upload 15 images and
- 15 images does not mean 15 finished artworks. The amount of finished artworks students can upload for this section can be anywhere from 1 to 15.
- Every image must be accompanied with the height, width, materials consumed, and processes used.
- Students are required to write 2 short answer responses to the following prompts. (Each question has a 600 character limit. That’s about 3-4 sentences.)
- Identify the inquiry that guided your sustained investigation.
- Describe the ways your sustained investigation developed through practice, experimentation, and revision.
- Selected Works. Students are required to upload either 5 or 10 images, depending on what examination category you are taking. 2-D and Drawing is 5 images. 3-D is 10 images.
- In this section, you must have 5 completed artworks. The 3-D portfolio requires you to take 2 photographs of the finished piece from different angles. The 2-D and Drawing portfolio just requires one photograph.
- You are allowed to reuse images from the Sustained Investigation section.
- Every image must be accompanied with the height, width, materials consumed, processes used, and ideas applied.
Reading over these requirements and looking over the grading breakdown, my overall advice regarding strategy is to consider what you will write about your artwork, before going on to make that artwork. If you are struggling to say how your artwork is progressing your portfolio in showing how you experiment, refine, or practice your application of materials, processes and ideas in your artmaking, then it is very likely you didn’t do those specific things.
The writing is a decent chunk of the total grade. So do not neglect it.
Sustained Investigation
The Sustained Investigation section confuses students the most. I encourage that you read the official documentation before reading my explanation. Several points frequently come up as problems in my history of teaching this course, and I will address them here.
The Guiding Inquiry
The official documentation states that the Sustained Investigation requires students to make and present work that is unified by a single guiding inquiry. In my experience, the most common frustration I encounter with students is that they misinterpret this phrase and equate it to mean merely just a visual theme or motif. And so they came back to me and say, “Teacher, my sustained investigation is flowers!” Or love, or global warming, or something else to that effect. The end result is a lack of direction, and poorly-defined goal setting, which then results in lackluster responses for the short answer section.
To make this as direct as possible, I am going to require students define their guiding inquiry under my preferred format. It goes as follows,
- Define an effect/goal that you want to achieve on the world, people, your self, … whatever.
- Define the scope/restriction of your artmaking with which you want to achieve that effect or goal. Make sure to consider materials, processes, and ideas when defining your scope.
Once you have defined 1 and 2, combine the two parts into a question of the form
How can I achieve <part 1> by doing <part 2>?
To give you some examples, let us examine how we can fit the endeavours of historical art groups into this format.
- Impressionists (e.g., Claude Monet)
- Goal. Capture the fleeting, shifting optical sensation of light and atmosphere on a landscape at a specific moment in time.
- Scope (Materials, Processes, Ideas). Restricting the palette to unblended, pure primary colors (Materials) and applying them in rapid, broken brushstrokes (Processes) to explore the idea of objective optical science over subjective studio painting (Ideas).
- Guiding Inquiry. How can I capture the fleeting, shifting optical sensation of light and atmosphere on a landscape by restricting my palette to unblended, pure primary colors applied in rapid, broken brushstrokes?
- Surrealists (e.g., Salvador Dalí or René Magritte)
- Goal. Shock the viewer into questioning reality by exposing the bizarre, dreamlike logic of the unconscious mind.
- Scope (Materials, Processes, Ideas). Utilizing traditional oil paint and glazing techniques (Materials) to paint ordinary objects with hyper-realistic detail while deliberately melting their textures and distorting their scale (Processes) to investigate Freudian dream theory and the subconscious (Ideas).
- Guiding Inquiry. How can I shock the viewer into questioning reality by using traditional painting techniques to render ordinary objects with hyper-realistic detail while deliberately melting their textures and distorting their scale?
- Expressionists (e.g., Edvard Munch or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)
- Goal. Convey intense, raw internal psychological states—like anxiety, isolation, and existential dread—directly to the viewer.
- Scope (Materials, Processes, Ideas). Using high-friction mediums like woodcuts or heavy oil impasto (Materials), violently carving or applying aggressive, jagged marks while distorting human anatomy (Processes), to visually manifest the idea of internal emotional turmoil over external reality (Ideas).
- Guiding Inquiry. How can I convey intense, raw internal psychological states by using high-friction materials and aggressive, anatomy-distorting mark-making?
- Color Field Painters (e.g., Mark Rothko)
- Goal. Evoke an overwhelming, meditative, or spiritual emotional response (such as awe, ecstasy, or doom) purely through visual immersion.
- Scope (Materials, Processes, Ideas). Utilizing massive, unstretched canvases and thinned, staining acrylic paints (Materials), staining the fabric with vast, borderless, softly blended fields of saturated color (Processes), to explore the idea of pure emotional resonance completely stripped of narrative storytelling or physical subjects (Ideas).
- Guiding Inquiry. How can I evoke an overwhelming, meditative spiritual emotional response by staining massive canvases with borderless, softly blended fields of saturated color?
- Pop Artists (e.g., Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein)
- Goal. Critique and blur the traditional boundary between elite “high art” and mass-produced commercial consumer culture.
- Scope (Materials, Processes, Ideas). Utilizing commercial silkscreen ink, stencils, and industrial canvas (Materials), employing mechanical reproduction and repeating factory-style printing processes (Processes), to investigate the ideas of mass consumerism, celebrity obsession, and mundane grocery store items (Ideas).
- Guiding Inquiry. How can I blur the boundary between elite art and commercial consumer culture by utilizing mechanical silkscreen printing processes to repeatedly depict mundane grocery items and celebrities?
By using this format, you gain clear criteria with which to evaluate your progress, ultimately allowing you to pursue the inquiry in earnest. This allows you to naturally hit the rubric marks for experimentation, revision, and practice. As you progress through your portfolio, keep asking yourself these questions:
- Am I able to achieve my goal through my restriction? Why or why not?
- For my next piece, should I try something new?
- Is my draft working well? Should I make changes to the composition?
- Am I performing my technique the best I can?
Image Selection
If the Sustained Investigation requires 15 image uploads, but can accept from 1 to 15 finished artworks, what do I do with the uploads that are not finished artworks? What should I try to show?
This is the next point that I find students strategize very poorly on. For instance, the most low effort way to go about the “progress” uploads is to just simply snap a photograph of their artwork when it is halfway-done. This is a mistake and a lost opportunity to address points on the rubric.
Remember, the grader wants to see evidence of your thinking, particularly, of you experimenting, revising, and practicing. How can they see that? They see that in how it manifests through your materials, processes, and ideas.
When you are choosing your images to upload, be deliberate in what you want to show the grader.
- Are you experimenting with a new artmaking process? Show them how it works.
- Are you trying to decide on what value design works best with your lineart? (Revision) Show them the lineart and all the value designs you’ve tried.
- Are you practicing your execution of a technique before working on the final piece? Show them the practice.
With the photographs, you are trying to tell them a story about your thought. You want to show them that you are constantly thinking about how to make your artwork better at achieving your goals.
Selected Works
In my experience, the Selected Works section produces much less stress than the Sustained Investigation. So I have less to say on this section, but the strategy here is still important.
Selected Works is a place where you want to showcase the best-of-the-best examples of you: applying complex ideas, executing technique, synthesizing materials, processes, and ideas together.
If you have oustanding artworks in your Sustained Investigation, you can definitely reuse them in your Selected Works. Two different people grade your portfolio. One person looks at your Sustained Investigation. Another person looks at your Selected Works. They will not know if you reused a piece or not, so always just put your best pieces down.
It is not a section about “breadth”, “variety”, or “range.” You do not need to try different mediums “just because,” and I do not recommend doing that.
Which Exam Should I Take? 2-D, 3-D, or Drawing?
One of the first decisions that you will make in the AP Studio course is deciding which portfolio examination you want to take in May. You can choose between the 2-D, 3-D, and Drawing examinations. Your decision will shape what kinds of works you are expected to turn in for the portfolio.
Think about what kind of works you want to make this year. Then, take a look at the table from the official page to help you decide. How are the 3-D, 2-D, and Drawing Exams Different?
Outside of the official statements, I encourage students to consider what resources are available to you.
- What materials do I have at home, in class, and at school? What is available for purchase in my area?
- What kinds of skills and expertise is available to me through my teachers, peers, and other people I know? Who can give me support and advice regarding my art-making process?
For example, if the school does not have the facilities for ceramic pottery, I would advise against choosing ceramics as your medium of focus.
Concluding Remarks
The AP College Board explicitly states that there is no preferred style or medium. In my experience, students who si. Don’t worry if you don’t exactly understand what that is yet. Your interests will reveal themselves throughout the year. Our job as a class will be to figure out what it is.
Quick Links
Official AP Course and Exam Description
How are the 3-D, 2-D, and Drawing Exams Different?
3-D Sample Portfolio with Scores