OCAD vs Emily Carr Portfolio: Piece Counts and Key Differences

Students applying to both OCAD University and Emily Carr University usually assume they can build one portfolio and submit it twice, and that assumption costs them. This post lays out exactly what each school asks for, where the two requirements genuinely diverge, and how to plan a single body of work that can serve both without being watered down for either. Here’s where the differences actually sit.

The Short Version

The two schools want overlapping things in meaningfully different packages.

OCAD University, in Toronto, asks most applicants to studio-based undergraduate programs for roughly eight to ten pieces of finished work, submitted alongside a sketchbook and a statement of intent, uploaded digitally through SlideRoom. Some programs — Digital Futures among them — publish their own separate guidelines.

Emily Carr University, in Vancouver, structures its Foundation Year portfolio as four equally weighted components rather than a single body of work: examples of your creative practice, process documentation, a studio assignment, and a writing assignment. Emily Carr states plainly that the portfolio accounts for the majority of an applicant’s overall admissions score, and submission happens through the ECU Admissions Portal after applying via EducationPlannerBC.

That structural difference — one portfolio versus four weighted components — is the thing to plan around. Everything else follows from it.

Where the Piece Counts Diverge

OCAD’s expectation of eight to ten finished pieces is a fairly conventional art school ask, and it’s the number that should anchor a student’s production schedule.

Emily Carr gives applicants options for the artwork component rather than a single count. A student can submit ten to twenty single images; or up to ten minutes of time-based media; or a hybrid of up to five minutes of time-based media plus up to ten images. That flexibility matters enormously for students working in video, animation, or sound, who are frequently disadvantaged by portfolio formats built around still images.

Emily Carr also applies a recency rule that OCAD does not state in the same terms: work should have been made within the last two years. A student planning to lean on a strong Grade 9 piece needs to know that going in.

For transfer applicants with previous post-secondary study, Emily Carr asks for ten to fifteen examples of recent work, with the majority — half or more — being self-directed projects made outside a structured class. That self-directed proportion is worth noting even for high school applicants, because it signals what the school values.

The Process Requirement Is Not the Same Thing

Both schools want evidence of thinking, but they collect it differently, and this is where a copy-paste submission falls apart.

OCAD asks for a sketchbook alongside the finished work. Emily Carr asks for a distinct, labelled component called Process Documentation — one compilation showing how a student gets from idea to finished project. It can be sketchbook pages, project documentation, a process journal, early-stage clips, storyboards, or writing that explains the iterative process, submitted either as a PDF of up to ten pages or a video of up to three minutes.

The practical consequence: a student who has been keeping a real sketchbook all along can satisfy both. A student who has been producing polished finished pieces with no visible development has a problem at both schools, and a bigger one at Emily Carr, where process is a quarter of the weighted assessment rather than a supporting document.

This is precisely why serious portfolio preparation treats the sketchbook as primary work rather than as scaffolding to be tidied up at the end.

The Assignments Only Emily Carr Asks For

Two components have no OCAD equivalent, and they’re the ones students most often discover too late.

The Studio Assignment. Emily Carr asks applicants to respond to one of three set prompts — building a three-dimensional object using only three sheets of paper and glue, documented from at least two angles; making something that maps a typical week of your life, in any medium; or telling a story in three original images. These are deliberately open, and they reward inventiveness over technical display.

The Writing Assignment. This is directly informed by the studio assignment: roughly 250 words reflecting on what you made and why, what challenged you, how you adjusted, and what you’d want to develop further — plus a short response, around 75 words, on which program you’re applying to and why.

Neither can be improvised the night before submission. Both need to be scheduled into a student’s final year as actual assignments with actual deadlines, which is how they get treated in structured art portfolio preparation in Etobicoke — hour-long sessions at $310 monthly with materials included, after a $70 trial, precisely so that the writing and the set assignments get real studio time rather than being squeezed in around finished pieces.

How to Build One Body of Work for Both

The efficient approach isn’t two portfolios. It’s one deep body of work plus school-specific packaging.

Build twelve to fifteen strong pieces. That gives you the eight to ten OCAD wants after cutting, and enough for Emily Carr’s ten-to-twenty range without padding.

Keep everything within the last two years. Emily Carr’s recency rule is the stricter constraint, so let it govern. Nothing is lost by applying it to OCAD as well.

Include observational work. Both schools value it; Emily Carr explicitly recommends at least one piece made from observation, made with immediate tools rather than heavy filtering or effects.

Maintain the sketchbook continuously. It becomes OCAD’s sketchbook submission and the raw material for Emily Carr’s process documentation.

Treat the set assignments as separate deliverables. Schedule the Emily Carr studio and writing assignments as their own projects, ideally in the fall, not the week before the deadline.

Write the statement of intent early. OCAD’s statement and Emily Carr’s writing responses ask related questions, and drafting one makes the other significantly easier.

One deliberate exclusion: don’t submit derivative work built on existing characters or established intellectual property. Both schools are looking for a student’s own perspective, and Emily Carr says so explicitly.

Deadlines, Delivery, and the Details That Sink Applications

The submission mechanics differ and neither is forgiving of last-minute confusion.

OCAD applicants upload through SlideRoom after their application has been processed, receiving instructions by email. Emily Carr applicants apply through EducationPlannerBC first and then upload portfolio items to the ECU Admissions Portal — portfolios are not accepted by email or any other platform.

Deadlines vary by intake and by year at both institutions, and Emily Carr runs more than one intake. Confirm current dates directly on each school’s admissions pages rather than relying on a number from a previous cycle. The same applies to file formats and size limits, which Emily Carr publishes in detail and which do change.

The Academic Side Is Not Identical Either

Portfolio planning gets all the attention, and then a strong applicant discovers a course requirement in Grade 12 that can’t be fixed.

Emily Carr publishes explicit academic requirements for Ontario applicants, including English 12U alongside a specified number of additional Grade 12 courses, with a minimum overall average and a minimum grade in English. The university states clearly that meeting the academic minimum does not guarantee admission, since the portfolio carries the decisive weight — but failing to meet it removes the application from consideration regardless of how strong the work is.

The practical implication lands in Grade 11, when course selection for the following year happens. A student who drops a required course to free up studio time can inadvertently disqualify themselves from a school they’ve spent a year building work for. It’s worth checking each target school’s published course requirements before finalizing a Grade 12 timetable, not after.

Language proficiency requirements are a separate consideration for students who completed secondary education outside English-language systems, and both schools publish their own accepted tests and minimum scores.

Two further scheduling realities are worth naming. Emily Carr runs more than one intake per year, which means more than one set of deadlines — the fall intake and a smaller mid-year intake operate on different timelines. And application to Emily Carr goes through EducationPlannerBC, a provincial system that Ontario students often haven’t encountered, while OCAD applicants apply through the Ontario system they’ll already be using for other universities.

None of this is difficult. All of it is easier handled in September than in January, when the portfolio should be absorbing every available hour.

Frequently Asked Questions

Planning the Year Ahead

Applying to both schools is entirely reasonable, and the extra work is smaller than it looks — one strong body of recent work, a genuinely maintained sketchbook, and two Emily Carr-specific assignments scheduled early rather than scrambled at the end.

If your teen is starting that year now, you can book a trial portfolio session to assess where the current work stands against both sets of requirements, or request more information about how the year is structured. General details on private art lessons are available for students not yet at the application stage.