There is nothing worse than a great photo ruined by camera shake. 

The blurry image here didn't come poor focus. Looking at the Exif data, the photo was shot at 1/30 sec. That's too slow for action shots. The aperture was f/5.6 and the ISO was set to 1600. 

Head for the art room and use your camera's macro setting. Look for the icon on your camera that looks like a tulip. It will be important to use a tripod or some other steady camera mount. If you don't have anything else, use a beanbag or even your tennis shoe. That's right, take off your shoe and use it to brace the camera to get a nice steady shot.

Use a large aperture for shallow depth of field, as in the photo below. Try a smaller aperture and experiment with that too.

Color and texture are easy to find in the brushes, paints and chalk boxes. The photo below is a great example from Irene Gr's photostream on Flickr.

Look at this amazing photograph. How many light sources were used? What did the photographer use to get the soft fill lighting and the front profile highlighting? Can you reproduce this effect?

What about the symmetry and composition of this image makes it appealing?

Take a look at other face profile tagged photos on Flickr for inspiration and then try some of your own.

From deskounlmtd's photostream.

I love the simpleness of this photo and yet, because it makes strong use of texture and composition, it is so powerful. The use of vanishing point and depth make the photo.

Many of the vanishing point photos on Flickr use wide angle lenses but not all. Enjoy some of these shots and then try your own!

The photos above are from Docman's and Giant McDonald's photo streams.