<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I'm looking for suggestions on ways to include chalk pastel and charcoal work in portfolios. It's challenging to keep the pieces in good shape - spraying doesn't always work so whenever they touch other things the dust rubs off. The best I've come up with is to use a portfolio with acetate pages and dedicate a page to each piece.</p>
<p>I'm also looking for suggestions on how to deal with pieces larger than the rest for the portfolio or pieces on canvas that won't fit in a portfolio. Right now the portfolio has to fit 19X25'' pages and I don't want to go larger if I can help it.</p>
<p>All thoughts are welcome.</p>
<p>I don't think there is a perfect solution. You've hit on one approach: separate each piece from every other one. I recall my daughter unfortunately having to touch up her pastel drawings each time the took them to a portfolio review. Eventually, she framed the best ones.</p>
<p>Your "backup" is also to make sure you have digital and/or slide copies of everything. But this by itself may not help if you need to show the real thing, which sometimes you do.</p>
<p>I might suggest your getting a larger portfolio without the acetate pages... just an open portfolio. Tape acetate in the window of a matte opening and place the matte over the charcoal or pastel art work. Use the acetate notebook style portfolio for the smaller work and put that in the larger portfolio. Any really large paintings that can't fit into the large portfolio, take a digital picture of the painting and print it on photo paper. Place the photo in the smaller portfolio. Good luck.</p>
<p>I had oversized charcoal drawings in my portfolio. The art school I applied to allowed me to submit my work digitally on CD. I set up my work with 2 studio lights, digital camera and tripod. I resized to 7.5x10 and resaved the work as JPGs and import them into a Powerpoint presentation. I'm happy to announce that I got in! :)</p>
<p>AnimeFreak
Congratulations! Sometimes the powerpoints are slow to open. If someone in admissions gets impatient, I worry they won't look at the work. Digital portfolios are becoming more common. I am hoping all schools will go to digital submissions soon. It is far easier on us art teachers! I have my students send a hard copy photos of any digital submissions, as insurance. I am glad to hear that worked for you.</p>
<p>Thanks artteach! I called the school to make sure what format or medium was best for the committee to review my work. I know most places still require slides or portfolios. My city don't develop slides anymore. So creating a digital slide show in Powerpoint worked for me. I guess I could have done it in Flash or Acrobat as well too.</p>
<p>//Sometimes the powerpoints are slow to open//</p>
<p>They are slow to open if:
1. You are using a slow computer
2. The presentation is overloaded with graphics/images
3. The images are saved at a very high resolution.</p>
<p>One of the worst things to do is to place very large images in PPT and resize/scale them to fit. You should resize the images first in an image editing application and place them at 100% of scale.</p>
<p>Also, you probably don't need to make a PPT. Just save each image as a JPG with a unique name (slide<em>1.jpg, slide</em>2.jpg) and attach a description or inventory sheet. This way, you can keep the dimensions of each image larger and each image can be reviewed one at a time.</p>