Now that you’ve chosen your images and thought about how many to include, there are a few finishing touches you may want to consider to make your gallery more polished and professional.

Descriptions
I really like to have a title or explanation along with the picture. You can offer insight into the piece – say it’s a painting of a girl looking wistfully out of the window. Is it a portrait of your neighbor, or an illustration for a short story collection? Visitors to your site (and potential employers!) won’t know unless you tell them. Your art may speak for itself, but a one- or two-line description makes that extra bit of difference. It’s like hanging your artwork in a gallery with a small plaque next to it, as opposed to hanging it on your fridge.

The clean scan and the real deal
When you can, it’s nice to show the finished piece as it appeared in the magazine (or newspaper, or CD cover). It puts it in a context and shows your work off professionally. I like to show the illustration without any text on it, and then link to a second screen to show the artwork as it was printed. A simple photo can work well for this. In this picture, the client is holding the finished posters on screen 3. Links 1 and 2 show each painting individually, with no text on them.

In part four: How to get it all done.

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So now that you’ve rethought your homepage, it’s time to think about your gallery. Call it what you want, a gallery, a portfolio; this is where you provide examples of your work with a few pertinent details.

Choosing your work
When I was overhauling my site, I went through all my sketchbooks – and trust me, there are a lot of them – with post-it-notes. I tagged like crazy, made lists for myself, and remembered paintings I had rolled up in the closet but really liked. Or work I’d auctioned and didn’t have anymore, but I had photos. Examine everything you have for possibilities.

I took off almost all the artwork I had already up on my site – anything I thought was out of date, or a style I don’t care to work in anymore, or I just plain was tired of.

Look at your work as a whole – choose the pieces you’re proud of, the ones that make you laugh, the ones that resonate with you. If you’ve had anything published, and you like it, by all means, choose those. If you see that you have a lot of paintings of animals, and you’d like to be known for that, group them together. If instead you look and say, “wow, I have a lot of paintings of animals, but what I really want to do is more vector work”…. Well, you get it. You should be displaying work you like, that represents you, as you’d like to be known now. Not what you did three years ago, unless that style still works for you and shows off your talent.

How to display them

Many people (myself included) show thumbnails to give a quick scan of images to choose from. How large you decide to make them, and how much you wish to show are entirely up to you.

Your thumbnails will need to open to show the full image somewhere. Decide if you want them to pop open in a new window, or appear on the same screen. (More about the “how-to” in the next part of the article.)

Consider dividing your work into sections to make it easier for viewers to find what they’re looking for. For instance: published work and personal work; illustration and editorial. If you have different styles you want to show, sectioning them off like this is helpful. For my own, I have illustrations in one section (both personal and published) and stories in another – when I had a series of illustrations that went together with words, that I felt didn’t work as well as on their own. I also had a great time displaying them in a much more creative setting that I felt helped set the tone for the theme of the pictures.

In part three: Finishing touches.

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My website started out around 1999 as a personal site. I was learning HTML at work and wanted to try out new ideas on my own terms. I had redesigned the site a few times, but always kept the content intact. Fast-forward to this past summer, when I rethought the whole darn thing. I realized that what I really wanted to do was to change the direction and focus of the site and make it more of a showcase for my illustration work. I recently took a CSS class through Sessions.edu and used it, along with the practical work knowledge from my job, to overhaul my 8-year-old website. Since then, I’ve been a finalist in the Bloggies for Best-Designed Weblog and a Blog of Note on Blogger.com. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m thrilled to be guest-blogging here on Notes on Design! I’m an art director by day, illustrator by night, and hands-on-at-all-times Mama to three preschoolers. This means I am very good at organizing, but I’m ready to get creative at a moment’s notice.

I’m a great believer in keeping your creativity alive by always trying something new to spark your interest. That could range from painting with unusual materials, like wine, or coffee…

Doing fast-and-fluid portraits with your kids’ art supplies while they draw too: Read the rest of this entry »

First, I think of an idea. In comics, no matter how good your illustration skills might be, your comic will still be a flop if your idea sucks. I carry around a Moleskine notebook for my ideas (whether illustration or writing).

For multi-panel strips like Will Write For Chocolate, I’ve created Corel Painter templates of 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-panel strips.
I’ll usually type in the text first, then create a new layer and sketch in the art using a variant of the Smooth Round Pen, using a light grey.

Then I do the b&w drawing on a separate layer, colors in other layers. I usually keep colors on different layers so they’re easier to work with. When I’m happy with the result, I’ll delete the “sketch” layer, flatten everything into one layer, shrink it to the required dimensions and convert to JPG before uploading.

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I have several online cartoon strips. My style was pretty rough when I began a few years ago with http://www.waitingforfrodo.com, but I’m constantly working on improving my craft as well as reading lots of other online comics. My semi- autobiographical strip,
My Life In A Nutshell, is all over the place in terms of style. In Will Write For Chocolate, I’ve attempted to settle on a style throughout; I’ve actually (*gasp!) made some money with this strip.

In my last blog post, I’ll talk a bit about my own online comic creation process.

Some illustrators are paranoid about posting any images online in case their work is stolen or copied. While this fear is (sadly) not totally unfounded, so far I’ve found the risk well worth it. Nearly all my illustration clients have found me because of cartoons and illustrations I have posted online.

Here are some useful resources:

How to protect your online images

How to protect your digital photos from being copied

You can also apply a Creative Commons license to an image to give away specific rights with restrictions.

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Flickr used to focus exclusively on photos, and even had a policy early on making non-photographic content unsearchable.

Flickr has since acknowledged the popularity of its service with illustrators, however, and recently introduced filters instead; users can mark their content type as non- photographic images.

This change will also make it easier for potential clients to come across an illustrator’s work. The cartoon above was one of my early cartoon sales; a publications company found it via Flickr.

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I was delighted to be invited as a Guest Blogger on Notes on Design. I’ve been a freelance writer for quite a while, but doodled on the side. A few years ago, however, people started offering me money for my doodles, and I began to take illustration more seriously.

I experiment with a number of styles; I’m sure I’ll eventually settle on one longterm, but for now I’m having fun. Working with the digital drawing and painting tools in Corel Painter makes this possible.

Some illustrators sketch on paper then scan the drawings into the computer. My illustration and cartooning process is entirely digital from start to finish, using my Wacom tablet and pen.

I created today’s illustration with Corel Painter 9.5 using various digital brushes such as Sponge, Croquil Pen, Airbrush and Leaky Pen.

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After the painting is completed, I scan it in and adjust in photoshop (my style is kind of grungy and I can correct little mistakes a bit this way). This also allows me to send you the final digitally, so it’s easy for you to just plop it down into your layout.

Hopefully you love it, and you email back to say so. And then I’ll send you an invoice. And after it’s in your layout and officially printed, you’ll send me some tearsheets. (Sharing!) And we’re done. You then reflect on how nice was to work with an illustrator and get another creative mind on the problem. And I reflect on how your good design helps the illustration look great (and in turn, you look great… and more importantly: your client looks great). And then I go back to drinking my coffee.

The End. (See? Wasn’t that fun?)

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From the NoD Sponsor:

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