IEP: Creating an Artists Web Page

For my IEP project I chose to discover a way to post my artwork online. This is something I have wanted to do for a long time, yet never found the time to do it, until now. I began by photographing artwork that I have made in the recent past. I transported all work into the classroom as the set up was more accessible here. I then set up the area to take photos, set up the lighting, carefully arranged the lamps, placed the artwork onto a black velvet cloth, and set up the tripod for taking good, steady photographs. I got through all of my artwork and uploaded the images, then began editing them. Finally I uploaded some images onto flickr.com and realized that the images weren't the quality I would like them to be. 

Round two of taking images, I took several of the same image and played around with the lighting a lot more than I had done the first time. I'd say the trickiest part of this whole process was taking quality digital photos. The best luck I had was with more classroom lights on, and turning the neutral light off. The photos looked closer to their actual color with the warm spotlight on them than they did with the super fancy neutral art light. The second time around editing was much smoother than the first, as I had recently just edited all of the others. I did not want to alter the images with contrast or brightness, so I left that part alone. All that I really did was clip the images and then saved them. 

Uploading the images to flickr.com took a while as the connection was rather slow. I searched for other potential websites to post the images on, yet I was unable to find one that I really liked. Some were more directed toward design, some cheesy, and some just not that nice. I chose flickr.com because I like the range of skills on the page, it's free, and they have a decent layout for the photos. All in all, I'm rather pleased with the results and even more pleased that I underwent a project that I have long been wanting to do.  I plan to use the images that I photographed to further develop my art portfolio and motivate me to continue documenting artwork that I create, now that I know how accessible it is to me.

My images are located at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stacydee/

My IEP Lesson Plans are located at:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfs8st5b_12fz44X47n