By all means you can become one of the many portrait artists in the world. If you think you are falling short in your techniques; take lessons. With today’s technology much education can be found on video on demand. Information is at your fingertips as you tap your keyboard entering the Internet. You can sit down at any time of the day or night and take your lessons in the comfort of your home.

Drawing portraits is not difficult, however, you do need to learn basics and practice, practice, and practice. It is rehearsal observations that improve drawing skills. Before you start to paint your portrait it will need to be drafted. One of the first things you will need to learn is to draw what you see. This will take some training. One of the ways that I train myself is to cut a picture from a magazine, turn it upside down and draw what I see.

When moving the sheet of paper upside down or sideways it forces you to see what is there, not what you know is there. This will also remove what your perception sees. Unfortunately, our awareness can misinterpret how a figure truly appears. The other night I made myself do a drawing of a jar as an exercise. Trying to draw that jar was a lesson in drawing what you see. When I was done trying to duplicate the jar onto a sheet of paper; the results were very disappointing. The painting I drew was tall and lean with the lid inside the bottle.

The jar was a fat jar with an upright lid. The perspective of my jar drawing was very accurate. I really did not draw what I was seeing. I drew what I thought the jar looked like. The eyes of portrait artists are like the eyes of the camera. The eyes of the artists duplicates the image. Do not get discouraged. Practice is essential. If you tried this kind of exercise and you did not do well; practice. Instructors will tell you to draw each day. Practice will soon have you drawing and painting portraits. Portrait artists practice every day.

A good sketch is essential to a portrait painting. There should be alert to rate, proportion, size, and space. Paint the skin areas of the face, ears, and neck with desired flesh color. Slowly layer the paint to create shadows. Outline the face, ears, and neck with a thin coat of burnt umber. I find this especially important to separate face from neck and to emphasize ears if necessary. Paint on a portrait each and every day. Awareness practice will have you become a better painter and join other portrait artists in an amazing and interesting art form.

You need to know about this, but it can be very complex. If you stick to simple basics and don’t try to get fancy, you will have no trouble with the colors you use on your website. All you need to know is that some colors look terrible and some look fine on just about everyone’s computer. Just because you are an artist and work with colors everyday, you will still need to consider carefully at how the colors you use for your business are represented on the web.

I don’t advocate lots of graphics anyway, so you might want to simply get a professional web designer to make any custom graphics for you so you won’t have to worry about this issue too much. Some people waste lots of time and money trying to match the color of their site to some fancy custom brochure they have. It just doesn’t work that way. Monitors cannot display accurately or even consistently colors as well as printing can.

If you really want to try it, do your web first and then drive your printer crazy trying to match ink to a website that looks different on every single monitor it is viewed on. Another important thing is the color scheme for your website. You don’t want a website that is just screaming to people that you are trying to sell something. One of the key things you want to do is make people comfortable at your site. The colors that make people comfortable, are the colors they are used to seeing. Many people are new to this. They’re scared to be on the computer in the first place. You might consider reducing your color scheme to a gray and blue, which is used in many Microsoft programs. People are accustomed to seeing these colors and it doesn’t scream at you and don’t forget about using only web safe colors as mentioned above.