August 12, 2013: Yes, I'll say it again, "I haven't forgotten this site!" I have been doing my fair share of painting and drawing, but not so much blogging or web authoring (or cleaning up some of the parts of this 10+ year old site). I'm going to try to do more of that now.

Keep an eye on the blog section of the site, because that's where I'm probably going to be focusing for a while. I'm especially keen on painting and figure drawing at the moment, but also want to discuss tips for newbies too.

January 28, 2013: I haven't forgotten this site! There have been a lot of things going on. Mostly a lot of painting, but I know I need to do some new drawings for the site as well. I just wrote this tutorial on my companion blog, about using cheaper student paint for portraits.

January 1, 2013: Happy New Year! I have been good on my word, and have been busy updating the site. Knock on wood, I hope to get through it in the next several weeks. (I hope it won't take longer than that, but if it does, it does. I see a lot of pages that need fixing and updating. And some artwork that needs to be replaced. Yikes!)

I've written my first completely new tutorial (in about 7 years?) in the Color Section, Real World Color. I've also done extensive updates (in some cases) on other pages, with adding new content and fixing up parts with corrections or merely updates. In addition, I've added a new blog post Oil Painting Primer & Working with a Limited Palette.

I think that part of the reason I'm (finally) fired up to update the site is because I've been creating a lot of new artworks lately, after a too-long lag (as other obligations were pressed upon me). It's hard to explain why it took so long, but it is what it is. I hope that my real life won't intervene with all the updates that I have planned, but if that happens, please forgive me and be patient. I at least got this much done, right?

December 29, 2012: *gulp* again! It's been TWO AND A HALF YEARS until my last formal update! (I have done some tweaks here and there, though.) But now I have some news! I'm biting the bullet and doing Facebook, and Heaven help me, I'm starting a portrait-artist.org blog. There's not much there yet, but I hope to start working on that pretty soon. Lots of updating to do at the moment, just everywhere. Plus I'm painting too (and filling a different blog up with those paintings) so my plate is kind of full at the moment, which is good! Very good!

Right now I'm adding Facebook links on each page, manually (give me strength!) and doing updates to each page individually. (Which is a good thing, right?) I am also pretty sure I'll be updating some of the artwork too, as well as adding pages here and there if it's not too inconvenient to do so. I have resisted Facebook for as long as I can. I'm not the hugest fan of Facebook, but it has its fun side.

I've also been painting a lot lately (portraits, por supuesto!) so if you want to take a peek at my portrait painting blog, check out portrait-art.biz. It's just been started at the moment. I'll be doing lots of painty-geeky posts there, and giving updates on my latest paintings, as well as posting tutorials on how-to-paint and how-to-draw.

The portrait-artist.org blog will be increasingly useful (I am hoping) because I have to be honest here—this web site is almost 11 years old right now. ELEVEN. That's about 100 in people years. (Okay, I don't know if that's true, but it sounds about right, okay?) I created this site with Dreamweaver 4, I think. My gosh, we're up to what? Dreamweaver CS 6? I am still using Dreamweaver CS5. (And I hate it. But I digress.) The point is, the formatting and code on some of this site are really old. And I'm not as tecnically savvy as I should be, and I don't think I can face updating everything. I just want to lay down in a faint at the thought. So I hope that I can add stuff on the blog and then link to the blog posts (if appropriate) from one of my static, 11-year-old pages from the "main" portrait site. Stay tuned, and in the meantime, why not "like" my Facebook page and say hello!

April 18, 2010: *gulp* Has it really been almost FIVE YEARS since I entered an update on this site? Seriously? I have done tweaks now and then, but not updated this page. Well, I'm gradually going through and trying to update things and it's going to take a while. I got rid of the '1998 wants its title graphics back' titles (just sticking with plain text titles from now on) and I've been updating links and fixing up a few details here and there. Sooo much else to do, though. And I do want to add more to the site, but right now, first things first. I need to do a lot of "grunt work" which is horribly tedious.

And by the way, I am sorry about being so bad about answering emails. I really appreciate all the emails I get. I am sorry that I can't seem to be better at responding. There are always a lot of things going on in real life.

April 30, 2005: I added a page to the Digital Art, Anatomy and Misc. section, about creating your own art site or portfolio site. It's called Getting Web Ready. I'm not saying I'm the foremost expert on web design, but I'm prolific and I've got the basics down pretty well. Hope to encourage more artists to put their work on the web!

I'm also revving up to update my Photoshop pages, since Adobe's come out with a new version, Photoshop CS 2. I've got my upgrade on its way from ClubMac, and am using a demo version right now (because I just couldn't wait!). So far it seems pretty good. A few features that I like already. Will report more later.

August 30, 2004: It looks like the transition to the new host is going well. The new host has some good stats/tracking features, that allowed me to discover that I'd actually been missing my page on Acrylic Paints for quite a while! I was mortified! But thankfully, I was able to quickly replace the page from a backup I'd made of the site.

Some of you may notice that some graphics files that you are using ("hotlinking") for your blogs or message board avatars are no longer showing up. That is because I turned on the "no hotlinking" feature with this new host. This was long overdue. Hotlinking is frowned upon by most webmasters and I feel no differently about it. I apologize if a few of you lost images that you were using to link back to my site or to make some commentary about drawing portraits. If you still want to display one of my graphics, please contact me.

To learn more about the evils of "hotlinking," read here. (Link opens up in new page.)

March 26, 2002: Portrait-artist.org now has a search engine! Check it out! Also, I have added a "digital art materials" page to the "Basics" section.

March 4, 2002: Created the "Gesture Drawings" and "Proportions of the Figure" pages in the "Anatomy, Digital Art and Misc." section.

February 25, 2002: I have added a portrait art online poll. Fill out the poll, see instant online answers!