Digital Jewelry Portfolio

At some point in time, most artists will be asked by someone some where to “see” his or her work. Of course, one good thing about being a jewelry artist is that you can usually carry around a few pieces or at least wear some of your artistic endeavors. However, eventually, as you expand your repertoire you may find that you just can’t keep lugging around everything you’ve ever made. When this day comes, it’s time to seriously consider creating a portfolio of your work. While most often this is done in hard copy form with a pretty leather case and color snap shots of your designs, with today’s technology it makes more and more sense to have a digital portfolio as well, if not even instead of a hard copy.

Creating a digital portfolio can be advantageous in a number of ways:
- It allows you to show your work to people all over the world;
- Once you set it up, you can often update it with just a few key strokes;
- You can include the URL on business cards and other forms of promotional material,
- And, obviously, you can include a lot more work in virtual space than you can off-line, so it’s not so heavy to carry around.

Now the question is no longer why but how. You could go the website route and create a website using an ISP or any number of free website areas on the Internet, but you may also want to consider some of the websites now available that are set up more like on-line photo albums. Some of these include webshots.com, PictureTrail.com, and imageevent.com. These photo-friendly services are ideal for artists’ portfolios because they are designed primarily to store graphics. You can also add text in most cases, but you don’t need to know HTML (web coding language), and they are fairly user-friendly since most people who use them are not trying to create large websites. Instead, they are just trying to post pictures in order to show off family members or, in an artist’s case, his or her artwork.

Once you find the place to store images of your artwork, you need to find a way to create these images. For jewelry, I can’t emphasize enough how handy a flatbed scanner is today. Of course, not all pieces are flat enough to put on a scanner, but many of them are. Another alternative is to use a digital camera or take 35mm photographs and then scan these. It takes a little more practice and effort to take pictures of your jewelry, but it is possible to take your own photographs.

Creating a portfolio of your designs is not a task for the faint of heart, but it is not an impossible task either, and once you become serious about your artwork, it is the next logical step.