How to find pencil portrait clients

Finding your first clients...

Make some samples

Draw your children or a friend's children from photos. You will need some originals to show in person to people and/or you can draw portraits
of the children of friends and family as gifts and use the digital photo or scan of the artwork on your website or as portrait examples you can email to people.

Get business cards

Full Color Business Cards from PsPrint

Get some that show an example of your artwork on them. My first business cards were homemade, but I suggest having them printed professionally. It's a good investment and not as expensive as you might think. Most office supply stores do this or you can have them done at an online sites. See my page on Promotional Materials for Artists for links to online printing websites and more information on this.

Do you want to specialize?

You can decide to specialize in one thing - ie: colored pencil portraits of dogs or pencil portraits of houses. These would not be advertised in the same way or the same place, necessarily.

Specialization has the advantage of allowing you to focus on one area of art and one target market, but the downside is that you are only offering one type of portrait product, so it can be limiting. I do portraits of everything. I joke that I will draw anything that's legal!

If you especially love animals and drawing pets but you don't like drawing people, then it would be advisable to specialize in pet portraits.
Trying to draw things that you are not comfortable with will usually bring you only misery. One time I thought I could do a portrait of a steer. Because I don't know cattle very well, I had a lot of trouble doing it. The client was wonderful and patient, but it hung heavy on my heart that I just couldn't seem to get it done right. I contacted another artist who has a lot of experience with livestock and it was fine with the client for the other artist to do the portrait, so the job was forwarded to the other artist, and she did a great job! The client was happy, and in the end, that's all that matters!