I was browsing through Flickr and came across an excellent pencil portrait artist that holds a raffle every two weeks to give away a free pencil portrait of a jpeg you submit. It will be a printable scan of the portrait so you can print it out on your home computer. I guess if you liked it really well, you could buy the original pencil and have it shipped to you.

What a neat idea! I have been thinking about how badly I need the drawing practice after being away from drawing and painting for most of the last 3 or 4 years. Not to mention, those 12 foot tall foyer walls are desperately empty. My original portrait market has bound to have gone cold by now as most of the orders I took before dropping commissions four years ago were from Greenville, SC. That is 780 miles away - we moved from SC to Arkansas in 1997. I doubt that I am going to be doing that kind of traveling any time soon. LOL. So, I am going to try raffles too.

I am going to begin with one free portrait each month and send a printable scan just like this artists is doing. If I find that I can do more than one a month I willl draw a name again. The original can be purchased for $40 (unframed) if you would like. For those that buy an original, that should cover my materials, shipping, and give me a wee bit of money to invest back in to getting my stock of paper, paints, framing, and other assundry tools back up again. For those that don't buy the original, it will give me some art to fill up all the empty space on the foyer wall. :0) How does the idea sound?

Enter both raffles. You have an even better chance of getting a free portrait. Just send a jpeg of the photo you would like to have done as an entry. For me, send it to armoorefam@centurytel.net and then enter at http://www.idraw4you.com/freedraw.htm. The rules at http://www.idraw4you.com/freedraw.htm apply here as well - if I cannot draw from the reference sent, it cannot go into the raffle: The photo must be yours or you have permission to use it, no celebrities, the jpeg must be clear enough that I can see it well enough to draw it. I don't mind if you send multiple submissions. Send them in separate e-mails if the total is over 3 or 4 mb.

I am really looking forward to doing these. :0) Oh, I guess there may be some of you who haven't seen any of my artwork. Here are a few thumbnails. Just click them to see a larger image.