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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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Design, Design Careers, Illustration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.