Black and White Portfolio Pieces

Don't you just love items checked off a to-do list?  One long overdue item on my list was a black & white gallery on my portfolio.

In fact, I was a little crazed last night and updated my entire portfolio.  I'm feeling like it's coming together now with the watercolor samples adding up. I have a Products and Projects gallery showing my work in action thanks to the Make Art That Sells Bootcamp.. And I made a new banner for the website and blog - peek up there. It's a rare day - I'm pretty happy with my portfolio at the moment. It's a nice mix of new work and favorites, all whittled down to my strongest pieces.

Now to get my promo postcards finally in the mail...

www.heatherpowersart.com 

Website Woes & Tips, Part 1

So I started my weekend off with every intention of creating a new portfolio website.  I had looked over my options and thought the most professional way to go would be to self-host a Wordpress blog/website combination that featured a gallery of my work.

I bought a new domain name - it was time for a change. I knew that Go Daddy had hosting support for Wordpress, so I purchased the hosting package.  After getting things set up, I went off to find a template that fit my needs

Okay - fast forward to 3 hours later.  I could not find a template under $50 that fit my needs.  I settled for one I thought I could do a little adjusting with and purchased it.  Off to Go Daddy to install and start posting.  Only wait, it's not easy to hack.  It's not intuitive and I quickly realize I have no idea what I'm doing here.  I need a tutorial, I need a manual, I need a class, I need a designer!  5 hours into the ordeal I say to heck with it.  I'm going with a portfolio site.

An hour later, new website is up and running and ready to go.  With a little help from Godaddy, I transferred the domain name to the portfolio site and created a subdomain for my blog.  Everything now publishes under heatherpowersart.com.

I went with Carbonmade for my portfolio site for a couple of reasons:

1. I had tried their free version and liked how easy it was to set up.
2. Great value - for the same price I was paying for a 10 page website. I get 50 projects (pages) and 500 images.  It's ad free, they have tech support and you can have private projects that aren't published on the site. Oh and it looks good on mobile devices and has a separate page for each image.
3. I saw that Julie Fortenberry was using it and liked the way it looked, it was nice to see someone else using it.
4. I knew from looking at some of the examples that you could do some tweaking to customize the site to make it look less like a template.

So my advice - if you are not a designer and are looking for a webite option, I recommend going with a portfolio site that you can customize and use domain forwarding.

Why torture yourself with trying to design a website?

Find something that is simple to use and minimal in design so that your artwork is shown in a professional manner.  Then after you get a big juicy book contact, by all means hire a brilliant designer to create the website of your dreams.

Join me tomorrow, I will share some little cheats that I did to make the Carbonmade template more like a website.

*I'm not affiliated with GoDaddy or Carbonmade - just happy they exist!

Fairy Tales

Pulled from the Humblearts archives. 

Hmm, I may have to work on some more lettering, that was fun stuff.

Run jack run!

Need to work on your porfolio?

Take 3 classic fairy tales and illustrate 3 scenes from each one to tell the story:

1. Illustrate one for the board book market - simple shapes, bright colors, easy to read.  Here is a tip, the character size doesn't change in a board book. 

2. Illustrate one for the picture book market, which is usually 3-6 years old.  Only put a twist on the fairy tale, mix it up, place the story in an unlikely setting, etc.

3. Illustrate one in an early chapter book style - black and white, for 1st-3rd grade.  Bonus points if you create a mock-up cover for the fairy tale chapter book.