Art Selection For A Portfolio? Oh, my!

It sounded so easy. All I had to do was create an online portfolio to send to children's book publishers.

Selecting a website builder was straight forward, choosing a template for my site was a little harder as there were so many to choose from, picking a colour theme was a bit tricky, and settling on the perfect font took some time. So far all was going well.

And then I had to pick out which art I wanted to put in the portfolio and everything ground to a halt.

I think many artists are their own worst critic. I know I am. Months or even years after I have completed a piece I often look at it and think, "Oh, if only I had done this." However, there's nothing to be done as the art is already out there in the world. So now I had to look at this same art and decide if it really represented my skills and abilities to a publisher somewhere in the world. I had to look past "Oh, if only I had done this".

Slowly and carefully I went through years of work and pulled out the best. I uploaded it to the site. I built a menu of categories. I played around with plain galleries and slider galleries. I made sure the art was presented clearly on both computer and smart phone screens.

And then I discovered some art from the early years had low pixel counts. In other words, this art would be blurry when it popped up on the screen. Argh. I couldn't show blurry art to publishers! So back this art went into several programs I have and I brought up the pixel count. Once again I loaded it on the site and no more blurry art. Hurrah.

At last I can publish my art portfolio. It's done and it was sort of easy and....what's this? I need to use SEO tools so my website shows up on search engines. What? Double argh!

It sounded so easy.