SanDiego Comicon,portfolio reviews, and deviantart

Well i just got back from the SD Comicon this past monday. I had a good time. Saw alot of celebrities. Met alot of my favorite artists.

I went to 3 portfolio reviews. Nickelodean, Nickelodean Artist Mentorship program, and Pixar.

Nickelodean - basically said that they liked my graphic design in my portfolio, and my animal gesture drawings. They liked my characters but said that they all had to be in the style of all of the nickelodean shows to show that i could draw in different styles.

I also had some comic strip work that i wanted them to look at for storyboarding. However they wouldn't even look at it because it was not in a Storyboard format

They also said that they accept hand done traditional art portfolios but they do work all in digital on cintiq tablets. In other words it is probably better to do a future portfolio entirely digitally because if i was to get a job there then i would have to work entirely digitally anyways.

Nickelodean Artist Mentorship Program - This seemed like a good idea at first. (a 6 month paid artist internship at Nickelodean doing a variety of art related jobs for various cartoons such as character design, prop design, backgrounds, and some storyboarding).

First of all i included alot of characters in my portfolio so immediately the person doing the reviews said that i would need more prop design, backgrounds and storyboarding. At the same time, i spoke to alot of artists in the animation industry and they stressed that studios donot look for a jack of all trades guy but instead someone specialized in one things. So In other words studios would rather have a guy that only does character design or only does backgrounds. So this whole mentorship may be counterproductive to my final goal.

Pixar - Pretty reasonable review but a bit confusing. They did like my characters but said that i needed to include more sort of progress drawings that led up to the final characters. Also to include more turnaround drawings and elaborate on single characters.

What confused me the most was the fact they they liked the half done gestural horse drawings over the completed colored figure drawings that i did. They said that the gesture drawings had more life than the completed figure drawings. Again this seems counterproductive to me because generally when people buy my art, they want to see a final completely polished piece so in proceeding to do gestural quick drawings like this, people just don't like them or won't buy them.

From all my years of being on deviant art, i can't seem to figure out why my original characters and ideas don't seem to fly for me on here? Other people are successful with posting and having views on their original ideas and characters. The only things that i seem to get views on or even people looking at are fan art. Maybe that's all i will even bother doing anymore. Does anybody have the same problems with this?