This one tool has saved me countless hours of time that I used to spend doing repetitive tasks to the digital images of my art — such as resizing them, making image adjustments, and creating thumbnails.

The following is a step by step example of recording an action on one typical image to resize it, add a watermark, and save it as both a PhotoShop file and for the web; then I’ll explain how, with a few clicks, you can use that action on entire folders of images.

Preparation

Make sure that you have prepared all your source images: that they have been neatly cropped, color-corrected and saved with meaningful filenames.  I find this whole process works best when I name my images by their title, and save them in folders named for the image size, type and purpose.

To be sure you do not write over your original high resolution images, before proceeding further, create destination folders for your various desired image sizes and types, such as “Website PSDs,” “Website JPGs,” and “Website Thumbs.”

Recording an Action

1. Open one of your typical source images.
2. On your Actions palette, click on the tiny down arrow and 3 horizontal lines at the upper right, then click on “New Action…”
3. Give your action a meaningful name, then click “Start Recording.”  PhotoShop will now record the whole set of commands you perform on your image, until you tell it to stop.
4. Click on “Image,” “Image Size” in the top main menu, make sure “Constrain Proportions” is checked, and type your desired width in the width box; then click “OK.”
5. To add a watermark, select the Type tool, set your desired color, font, font style, size and alignment. Click on your image where you want the text, then type your watermark text.
6. You may then want to style your line of text, perhaps changing the opacity and adding a light drop shadow.
7. Next, click on “File,” Save as…” and save the file in your desired folder.  Do not change the filename, as that will cause problems for you when you run your actions on other images.
8. Export using “Save for web.”   I generally find the “JPG High” preset options to be a good trade-off between size and quality for web images of artwork or photographs.
9. You could continue to resize and crop your image to create thumbnails or you can stop your action at this point.  To stop it, click the square “Stop Recording” button on the bottom of the Actions palette.

You now have your first custom action.

Running an Action

To use the action, make sure the correct action is selected in the Actions palette, then click on “File,” “Automate,” “Batch…,”  choose your Source Folder, and click “OK.”

As long as you included your destination folder(s) for your new smaller files when you recorded your action, you can just let the action run until it has processed your whole folder of images.  And that’s it!

Going Forward

PhotoShop Actions are very powerful time-savers.  Play with them a bit to discover the best sequence of useful steps for your images.  It may not be long before you have created a whole library of your own actions.

There are also many preset actions that you may find very useful (or just fun to fool around with).  Should you run into any problems using Actions, you can find out more detailed information in the PhotoShop Help files.

If you haven’t been using Actions for preparing your digital image files, I think you will find them to be really quite invaluable.

Did you find this tip useful?

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Texas Wax Website

Artist and web guru extraordinaire Haley Nagy and I have just completed the design of a new website and blog for all members and fans of Texas Wax, a regional encaustic painting society dedicated to promoting the ancient art of painting with wax.

Haley and I have been members of Texas Wax since the Austin group began in the spring of 2008.  Texas Wax is composed of active encaustic organizations in four Texas cities: Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.  As the four groups have grown and evolved over the past year+, we realized the groups had a need for a central website and blog to showcase all of our work, and to communicate with each other and with our fans.

Haley and I created the site in WordPress from a visual design that I created.  The underlying theme is based on the same theme I used for my fine art website and blog (a theme I created from bits and pieces of many other themes): Marilyn Fenn Studio.

The website features the usual stuff, but we also wanted to give all the artist members of Texas Wax the option of creating and updating their own profiles and gallery pages.  We modified the author page template with the help of several plug-ins (and some blood, sweat, and tears from yours truly), creating an artist directory that pulls their profile information into the author template/artist biography page. There’s also a link to their own gallery page.

We’ve included an events manager that will allow the regional chapter leaders to add events for their regions, and that will automatically move events from “Upcoming” to “Today’s Events” to “Archived” pages as the dates pass.  Featured on the sidebar are a dynamic Upcoming Events list and a rotating gallery of member artwork.

Member artists can add their voices to the blog and talk amongst themselves on a private member discussion list.

Fans of Texas Wax art and artists can sign up to receive blog posts as they are posted, and can sign up for mailing lists for the individual regions or for all of the chapters statewide.  We’ve also provided various contact forms.

Take a look at the brand-spanking new Texas Wax website, while we continue getting our artist members online (which is somewhat harder than herding cats!).

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I spent a lot of time trying out various options and a lot of different plugins. The ones listed below are the top 20 plugins that I found nearly indispensable for this particular site, which you can see in action here: Marilyn Fenn Studio.  As always, your mileage may vary.

1. WP CSS Dropdown Menu
   A three-level drop-down menu plugin for Wordpress.  It uses Stu Nicholl’s final drop-down code, which is CSS only.  You can modify the style to suit your theme, include a Home page button, and exclude pages from the drop-down menu.  I tried several other promising and not-so-promising options before finding this.  Eureka!
2. Reveal IDs for WP Admin
   In order to exclude pages in the above plugin, you need to know their IDs.  This plugin reveals IDs of pages, posts, tags, and categories, all of which I found very useful in creating the above site.
3. Flexi Pages Widget
   Allows you to choose which of your pages to display in the sidebar, whether to display sub-pages, and in what order to display the pages.
4. Different Posts Per Page
   This plugin allows you to return different numbers of posts per page type.  For example, you can show five, ten or all your posts on your Archive, Category and Tag pages, but limit them to 1 or 3 or 5 on your home page.
5. WP-PageNavi
   This gives you an attractive way to scroll through your post-pages, and really aids navigation, especially on a large site.  See the bottom of the home page on the afore-mentioned art site for an example.
6. AZIndex
   This plugin will create a very flexible site index for you with the greatest of ease.  Very nice when organizing a large amount of content, and it auto-updates when new content is added.  This is such a well-written plugin, and has the best documentation of any plugin I have tried, which I really appreciate!
7. NextGEN Gallery
   I’m sure this makes it to everyone’s list.  I did not use it on this, my design site, but found it great for my art site.  I used it to include a random gallery of paintings on my sidebar, to include thumbnails of related images in posts, and to create indices of paintings and photos.  I could have used it for my art galleries of thumbnails and large images, but did not in this case, as I have my own art image database which contains a bit more information than the NextGen plugin displays.  The developers continue to improve this plugin; they have recently added the ability to include titles.
8. Yet Another PhotoBlog
   This is a very cool plugin that allows you to insert an image once, and it will create different sized thumbnails to be displayed on different types of pages; for example, you can display small thumbnails of an image in the archive pages, another size on the home page, and another size on the individual post pages, and you can specify left or right display in all cases.  It only allows for the insertion of one image per post, but you can use the standard WordPress image upload tool to add additional images.
9. TS Custom Widgets
   This plugin allows you to include different sidebar widgets on different pages.  I found it very useful in many cases; for example, it gave me the ability to remove redundencies, such as an About Me box on the About page, or a random painting gallery on the painting gallery page, and to limit certain items to appropriate pages only, such as a blog roll only on the links page.
10. Simple Tags
    This is a very flexible and powerful little plugin for managing your tags.  It allows you to mass edit your tags, show related posts, create content-sensitive tag cloud widgets, and more.
11. Contact Form 7
    This is very nearly everything it needs to be.  This plugin allows you to create multiple instances of contact forms, using the standard form elements, and includes the ability to add a simple Captcha.  The documentation could use a little help; so you may need to read through some of the responses on the plugin homepage and do some trial and error to figure out just how it works, but once you get through that, it works like a charm.  You may also want the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin from the same developer — it used to be included, but now it’s a separate element — or the more robust WP-reCAPTCHA that I’ve used on this site.
12. Subscribe2
    A very simple plugin that allows your readers to easily subscribe to or unsubscribe from your blog.  It sends an email notification to the list of subscribers when new entries are posted.  You can also exclude notices from being sent on selected posts and pages.
13. Sociable
    This is about the fourth social network plugin I have tried that automatically add links on your posts to your favorite social bookmarking sites.  It is very flexible and unobtrusive.  I did love the look of one called “Sexy Bookmarks,” but it caused my pages not to validate.  I am using AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget on this site, and it’s great, too.  But Sociable may offer the most flexibility in what bookmarking sites you can include, and I like the faded icons that come to life when moused over.
14. Feed Reading Blogroll
    One of the things I loved on my Blogger blog was the Blog List that showed the latest updated blogs you are following, compete with newest post title and a thumbnail.  I loved seeing my artist blogger friends’ latest images displayed.  I searched and searched for something like that for WordPress, and this plugin is the closest thing I could find.  It works well, is pretty easy to set up, but lacks the thumbnail display.  Using Feed Reading Blogroll along with Interclue enabled on Firefox, I can still see the latest paintings from my artist blog list.
15. Broken Link Checker
    This checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.  Very handy for keeping link-rot out of your blog.
16. Maintenance Mode
    This plugin will add a splash page to your blog to lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance.  Yet you can continue to work on and view your blog as a logged in administrator.
17. DashBar
    This plugin adds a tiny logo in the upper corner, if you are logged in, with a two-level drop down menu bar that appears on mouseover.  It allows easy access to the dashboard or to add, edit or manage new posts/pages/links, and more.  I find it very, very handy, though the logout does not seem to work for me.
18. Akismet
    For keeping out the spam in your comments.  It seems to work very well.
19. StatPress Reloaded
    Excellent and very detailed stats displayed right in your WordPress dashboard.    You can export them out, too.
20. Google Analyticator
    Easy to use plugin for adding your Google analytics code to your WordPress blog.  Works very well.

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Stuff about me:

• My portfolio of paintings
• Artist information, including statement, bio, and resume
• News, event calendar, newsletter sign-up links, and news archives
• Contact information
• Blog posts about my art openings and events, such as last fall’s Fused Expressions opening
• Posts of my new work, often before I add it to the gallery pages

Stuff not about me:

• Blog posts about museum and galley exhibits, such as “Duchamp Redux” at the Norton Simon Museum
• Information about other artists, both famous and not-yet famous, such as this look at Earthworks Artists and Their Descendents
• Class notes from art school and art classes, such as Start Where You Are – Move On from There from Advanced Drawing with Barbara Rossi at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
• How-to’s and Reviews, such as this review from a series on free online artist portfolio sites
• Interactive Color Exercises – very popular with art schools and artists – try it, it’s fun!
• Quotes on art and much, much more…

Head on over to Marilyn Fenn Studio and have a look around, and then I’d love to hear your reactions.  You can comment below or fill out this very brief survey.

Cross-posted at Marilyn Fenn Studio.

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Today I will be reviewing the 1st of six of the free online portfolio sites that I have to sign up for.  So follow me through the process.

As I look at the next site on my list, FineArtAmerica, I do feel a bit daunted.  This is one of those online sites where you can not only show your art, but also sell high-resolution prints of your work, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. The first thing I noticed was a map of my state and “Your current location” with my city listed (how did they know?).  Further down the home page, there is an artist spotlight featuring the work of artists from my hometown.  Nice.

They seem to have a lot to offer besides the ability to show your work and sell prints of it.  They have good search tools for finding artwork and artists; a page of brick and mortar galleries located in my area, and more pages of galleries located successively further and further out.  The list doesn’t seem quite complete or accurate, though, so I assume it’s made by people who submit their own info (some important local galleries are missing from the list, and some things that are listed as galleries are mere one-person shops).  They also have a nice events calendar, so I can see that may be useful tool.

They have jobs listings, community links, news, and a tour of their site, which I highly recommend, as it more extensive and more interesting than what I can cover here.  My first impression is that even though the site looks packed with information, art and options, it’s well designed and well-thought out, so I’m intrigued.

They offer two levels of artist portfolios; a free one which does NOT include the print-on-demand feature; or for $30.00 a year, the level with print-on-demand, which actually looks like a great deal, if one is ready for that.  I’m going with the free one for now.

OK, so the Terms of  Use are acceptable; perhaps even better than average.  Adding my artist info was easy, except that I seemed to run out of room for my full bio, statement, and resume upon initial sign-up; though after I was given a password and logged back in, I was able to add the remainder of my info.

Uploading the first piece of art plus info was also easy, and each art piece has it’s own webpage (it’s own link), with places to: recommend, post a comment, add to favorites, submit to Stumble Upon, and share on Facebook. The viewer can also “Add This Artwork to Your Favorites Collection,” and “Add This Artist to Your Watch List.”

Besides including the usual (art, title, medium, dimensions, and price), you can add a description and tags.  Dominant colors and a URL link to the piece are auto-generated.  Very nice.  They also add little boxes onto your piece (on rollover) that the viewer can click to see a small portion of your painting at full-resolution (with a ghosted watermark).  This is a great feature that I will very much appreciate if and when I decide to offer prints for sale.  At present, the resolution  of my online images is too low to print from or to see any more detail.

Like most online portfolio sites, the first piece of artwork shown is the last piece added, but the cool thing is, you can change the position in which they are shown.  Oh, yah!  Plus, they allow you to show up to 100 pieces!  Pretty generous.

You can also add upcoming events to their calendar, view events by location, date, etc., view how many people have looked at your comments, and read comments they’ve left  for you.  While I was uploading my art, almost all of it got viewed by quite a few people , and I already received a nice comment.

Now this may be the coolest thing of all: you can set up your own mailing list right online through them, and mail HTML newsletters to everyone on your list; the newsletters will come through your email address, and you can see who opened them.  I think I will try it out.

FineArtAmerica was designed by artists for artists, and it shows.  They have quickly moved to the top of my list of free online portfolios.  I’m truly wowed!  I suggest you run, don’t walk, over to FineArtAmerica and set up your portfolio.

***It’s been several days since I signed up with FineArtAmerica.  I still love it.  On day2, I was a featured artist on the home page for the Austin area; a number of people have commented on my works there, and I have commented on a number of other artists’ works.  It’s a very friendly community.

Next: Check back next week as I sign up for and review Artist-Listing.

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My Profile Page

I’m back, finally!

I signed up with MyArtSpace in 2006 or 2007.  It’s a lovely space, with a very professional look.  I’m probably more fond of MyArtSpace than I should be, because it’s really buggy.  I’m only today finding out just how buggy it is!  For instance, I can’t login to it through my usual browser (Firefox, probably because I have AdBlock and Flash Block turned on) — but whatever the reason is, the “submit” button is missing from the login section of the page on my browser in FF, and I can’t find an alternative location to login from, so I’m having to use an alternative browser.

Even worse than that, however, is that when I go to view my art in different browsers, it may or may not show up!  First I couldn’t view my own gallery if I was logged in using Opera 9, Google Chrome, and IE 7, but I can’t view my galleries in Safari for Windows whether I’m logged in or not.   That’s not good.

And let me just go ahead and get my final complaint out of the way: MyArtSpace allows artists to add music to their gallery pages.  In my humble opinion, this is a bad idea.  It has nothing to do with viewing art, and the last thing I want when I go to any webpage is for somebody’s else’s choice of music to start auto-playing over the music I’m already listening to, so I will click away faster than you can say “lickety-split.”  Your mileage may vary, but artists — beware; just because you can add something to your web page, doesn’t mean you should.  This is most true for sound and animation — unless you’re a musician or an animator, and even then, you probably want to allow viewers to turn it on; or at least turn it off, but by no means should you offer your viewers no choice — unless you want to lose potential viewers. </off soapbox>

Enough with the complaints; let’s get to the heart of the matter — creating your own gallery.  As with most online portfolios, it’s a good idea to keep your resume, statement and bio in a plain text format, such as in Notepad, and then copy and paste from that into the appropriate little boxes provided for such information.  The little info boxes on MyArtSpace are quite small, so be sure to check that your information got inserted correctly — that your desired content is all there and that undesired line breaks didn’t get inserted.

Account page

Uploading your images to the galleries can be a little more complicated on MyArtSpace than on some other online portfolios; first you need to upload the images, then organize them into portfolios, and then from the portfolios, create your galleries.  Luckily they provide a good tutorial, helpful graphics and a wizard to make things even easier.  In fact, you probably want to use the wizard to upload your work the first time  — or anytime you plan to upload several pieces into a new gallery.

After they’ve been uploaded, your images will be contained in an image library, where you can go to add new work, and edit or make some detailed adjustments to existing work (such as adding a watermark and making the images printable, zoomable, downloadable, and emailable).   Just go to “Edit and Organize My Art.”

In either the wizard or the standard library view, there’s a nifty tag cloud for adding tags chosen from a list.  I used to be able to add my own tags (such as “encaustic,” which is not an option you can choose from), but now attempting to add my own tag just hangs up the browser.

The portfolios are for organizing bodies of work, and you can add a description for each portfolio, choose which piece represents which portfolio and add new pieces to each portfolio.

Finally, the gallery page is where your work gets publicly displayed.  They are displays of your artwork in a Flash-based page; one page per each gallery.  Any image that is not in a portfolio cannot be added to a gallery.  Each gallery contains thumbnails and a large image slideshow, with information for each image.  Here’s where the music would play, if you added it.  Here’s where I would click away from your work, if music plays.  Just sayin.’

One of My Gallery Pages

I haven’t found a way to re-order the order in which your images are displayed, and it seems they are displayed with latest added shown first.  Just keep that in mind as you build your galleries.  Start with the one you want on the left first.

MyArtSpace also offers an online store, but it costs, with various options and price points.  I haven’t added it, as I have my own website.

As with most other online portfolio sites, the artwork on the front page is displayed by most recently added, which quickly falls off the front page.  I added a few things in the past hour or two, and they are now on pages 2 and 3, and I’m sure they will be buried deep by the time I publish this story.  (Amendment: the front page does not show the most recent work, but featured content; however, you can search for “Most Recent” artists, galleries or images.  Several hours after my initial post of this story, my images are on pages 9 & 10, and my latest Gallery addition is on page 4 of “Most Recent” under “Galleries”  For what it’s worth).

My two favorite things about MyArtSpace are the quality of articles about artists (as well as the quality of artists showing there), and the opportunities for community with other artists.  I have met quite a few artists online through MyArtSpace.  You can “friend” other artists, and send them emails when you add new work or have an opening.

They also offer what seem to be some high quality art contests with great opportunities to show your work.

Overall, I view MyArtSpace as an attractive (if flawed) space to show your work, but more importantly, it’s a great place to connect with other artists –  if you use it to it’s fullest potential — and a great place to see and read about some very cutting edge work.  Worth the effort, I think….

Next review: join me in a few a days as I sign up for FineArtAmerica.  (Subscribe to my new posts in the Subscribe box on the right to receive the review when it is published).

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I signed up with Saatchi Online almost as soon as they started offering free online portfolios in 2006.  At the time, they offered “your own page which you can update as much as you wish. You can post up to eight images…and there is no fee, we have created this to assist artists in raising their profiles.”  OK!  Sounds good.  Where do I sign up?  (here: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/register/)

The Saatchi Online site is a very nice looking site, though I find the little boxes of links surrounding both sides of the main content column a bit overwhelming as a navigation method, and the page can be ridiculously long (see my page at right >).  There are some main navigation links at the top of every page, though I am not sure if those links include everything you can find on their site.  Luckily, they’ve included a very extensive site map.

They have a lot to offer; besides information on the physical Saatchi Gallery in Chelsea, they offer online chat, forums, and critiques; calls to entry, grants and funding; information on art fairs; links to art schools, dealers, galleries, and museums; a daily online magazine, blogs, and news; sections for under 17 students; and — perhaps one of the more interesting perks they offer — a “showdown,” where you can submit your work to be voted on by viewers in competition with other artists.

Over time, they have made a number of improvements to the portfolio pages, including increasing the number of images you can add — it appears to be 25 at present.  They do limit the size of your images to 500 pixels wide and under 2mb, but I find that is generous enough (and larger than they allowed formerly).  They also added an online salesroom, where you can offer your work for sale.  They take no commission and charge no fees for this service; the sales agreement is between artist and buyer.

Creating or updating your own gallery information on the site is quite easy; again, just copy and paste your plain text resume, artists statement, bio, etc. into the appropriate boxes.  There’s also a place for your photo, your email address, a link to your own website, and future shows.  Uploading new images is also very easy, and some of the fields “remember” what you typed into those fields previously, making it even easier.

They do request that you post the sizes of your images in centimeters, which is easy enough using an online conversion calculator (for those of us not thoroughly versed in the metric system). You might want to include the size in feet and inches in the description section, though, for those who don’t visualize in centimeters.

I did have a few technical issues when uploading new work today, which hopefully, they will fix soon.

I also wish they would give the artist some way of setting the order that the pieces appear on your page, especially since each piece is shown rather large, and in vertical succession; it appears that the piece shown at the top of your page will be the first one you uploaded (so potentially your oldest piece) — which is exactly the opposite of how I would order them.  As it is, the only way to fix that is start over every time you refresh your portfolio there.

Now for a few words on the Salesroom — this is the area where you can sell your artwork online — it is a totally different page from your portfolio page.  Unless I’m missing something, there is no direct link from your online gallery to your salesroom (and vice-versa, unless you are logged out), so you have to click on a link in the top drop down navigation to go to the Salesroom, then look yourself up.

Once there, though, it very easy to add your pieces to your Salesroom: with one click, you can add one of your portfolio pieces to the Sales page, and with one more click add the price, and then repeat the process for all your pieces.   One curiosity I discovered is that I was able to upload more than 25 pieces to the Salesroom, though only 25 pieces will show up on your portfolio page.

How your work in the Salesroom is displayed to viewers is disappointing.  One image is served up at a time, and while the “next image” will be yours, it is served up randomly, which means anyone viewing your Salesroom may not see all your work — unless they are obsessively patient — and they may see the same piece over and over again, giving you no control over what they will see or in what order.

Saatchi Online may be another good place to get more eyes on your work, but they show all work randomly, and the only way I’ve been able to find my own work on there is through a direct link or doing a search on my name.  So I do have to wonder how many other eyes have actually landed on my art.  There is certainly a lot of interesting information available to artists on the Saatchi Online site, which probably makes it worth your while to check out — and I have had requests for information on at least one of my pieces through them; maybe I’ll get more now that I’ve refreshed my pages.

The bottom line, however — I would not choose this site as my one and only online portfolio site.  It may be a nice addition to your own personal website or another free online portfolio, and then again, it may not even be worth your time setting it up.  I kind of hate to say this, because there’s much to like about the site, but the limited ways that your work may be found seem to really limit the number of viewers who will get introduced to your work on their site.

Tomorrow: MyArtSpace

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Also known as WorldWideArts Resources, AbsoluteArts.com advertise that they are “the largest site for contemporary art, art news, art history, contemporary artist and gallery portfolios” with over 170,000 works of contemporary art.  I signed up with AbsoluteArts.com in 2003.  They send out a newsletter not quite once a month, reminding me occasionally that I have a portfolio there.  Over the years, I think I may have gotten a response or two to the few pieces of art I’ve had online there, though nothing has ever developed from that.

My Free Online Portfolio at AbsoluteArts.com

At any rate, they offer three levels of portfolios, the first of which is free and contains:

• the artist’s information
• maximum of 8 images (which in most views is spread across 2 pages)
• spaces/pages for an artist’s biography, statement, exhibitions, gallery affiliations, reviews, collections, and commissions
• a spam protected email form
• a guestbook
• your links
• ability for someone to be added as a friend to the artist
• dashboard to update your portfolio (um, I say this because they tout it as a perk, but isn’t this a given?)
• support and questions with a human being
• optional credit card processing for $35.00
• optional direct URL to your AbsoluteArts portfolio for $20.00 (in this form: “www.absolutearts.com/yourlogin” — which I suppose is better than “http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/yourinitial/yourname/”)

Other options require an upgrade (add videos, blogs, events, slideshows, an email manager, and more), and the upgrades are not inexpensive ($44.00 – $100.00/yr).

The other sections on their site are:

• search by keyword on a variety of particulars
• search or browse for art/artists using a number of sorting parameters
• news on current art trends
• sections for reading about/researching artists/art history
• artists blogs, an artists cafe, and a discussion forum
• some calls for artists
• some options for linking your existing website to theirs

In December, they updated their Portfolio Manager to make it easier to update your online portfolio.

But I have to express some frustration with updating one’s portfolio on AbsoluteArts.com.  I just updated mine, and it won’t let me rearrange my artwork in the order I want it (it’s a numerical ordering system, and some of the number options are missing from some of the pieces).

In the Bio section, it asks for answers to specific questions, not all of which I feel are pertinent to my art or for which I have a ready answer, so they show up as “Not Provided” on my Artist Bio page.  Finally, the following Q & A appear on my bio page, but there is no place where I can answer the question: “Why Did You Become An Artist? — “not provided.”  Now that’s a question I would be happy to answer (for the record – I was born believing I would be an artist — the rest is merely fulfilling my destiny).

Otherwise, the process of updating older pieces and uploading newer pieces was fairly simple and went smoothly.

Updating my bio, statement, resume, and links was quite easy as well.  (TIP: keep a plain text version of all your artist info in something like Notepad that you can copy and paste from, since many sites are fussy about preformatted text).

But what they do offer at AbsoluteArts.com is a lot of information about artists.  For the buyer, that’s great; for an artist, it may be merely a bonus — if you’re like me, most of the time, you’d rather be creating your art than reading about other people’s art.  But for those times when I poke my head up and want to look around and see what others are up to, this would be an interesting place to investigate.

However, as a FREE online artist portfolio site, the limitation of only having 8 pieces online at any one time is harsh!  With so many other free online artist portfolios offering so much more, you’ll have to decide whether having a free portfolio at AbsoluteArts.com is worth your time and attention.  A paid portfolio may be worth it — they claim to have much higher traffic than many other free online portfolio sites — but in my humble opinion, that’s a lot of moolah to dish out if some kind of desired results cannot be guaranteed.  I’d rather spend that kind of money on my own website with my own URL and complete control over the look and contents — or art supplies or food.  As always, your mileage may vary.

Tomorrow: Saatchi Gallery

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d-ART was an early entrant into the rash of sites offering free online artist portfolios.  I signed up early on — in January 2003.  I haven’t fully participated in all that they have to offer (forums and critiques, for example), but I find them to be a great online portfolio addition to my own artist portfolio website.  They’ve updated their look and options a time or two over the years, always improving an already very good online art database.  Here is what my portfolio there looks like now:

Features:

• each artist gets their own set of pages that include:
  • your photo
  • a banner, which can be of your own design
  • a bio page
  • gallery “wings” of thumbnail pages with up to 50 images in (as far as I can tell) unlimited wings
  • large image pages with artwork information, price, dominant colors, and “private bids,” “add to favorites,” “contact seller,” and optional “buy now” buttons (see Paypal/Google below)
  • a browse/search box for your art gallery wings
  • a links section
  • your own signature or avatar
  • the ability to add Paypal or Google checkout to your listings
  • the ability to integrate e-Bay listings
  • the ability to sync your database enabled website with d-ART’s database
  • an artist’s forum for information that others submit about your art
  • community critiques by other artists
  • a contact form with spam protection
  • monthly stats of views and clicks
• your work can be found on the d-ART site by:
  • a direct link
  • “browse artist alphabetically” on the front page of the d’Galleries
  • browse work by type, genre, subject and price
  • search the Marketplace by new listing, random, keyword, type of art, subject, media, price, size, and/or color
  • keyword search at the top of every page
  • browse the Critic’s Corner
  • directly from Google.com / Froogle.com (via their daily database feed)

Of course, as you might expect, those artists who pay to to be a featured artist or be hosted on their site get more goodies, but what they offer for free is quite good.

d-ART is an excellent site for the art buyer, and a very good one for the art seller.  In the past 12 months alone, I’ve had almost 390,000 thumbnail views of the 33 pieces of art I had on there last year, and almost 68,000 clicks to the individual pieces; I’ve had several inquiries about individual pieces, though I have as yet made no sales through d-ART.

However, as good as d-ART is, I would not use it instead of a website where the URL can be a name of my choosing.  Using it in addition to your own website, however, can only help get more eyes on your work.  On the other hand, when you have your artwork listed on several online sites, you need to be very careful to keep the information current and accurate on as many sites as you have a presence on.

To that end, one of the greatest things that d-ART offers is the ability to sync up your database enabled website with their database.  My next step with d-ART will be to attempt to do just that.  Once I have done that, I will post how easy or difficult I find that process to be.

One last noteworthy comment I want to make; d-ART does make it very easy to add new artwork and information about the artwork — if you are uploading a number of pieces, the best practice is to batch upload pieces that are similar — then after filling in the information on the first piece, be sure to click on the checkbox “this piece is similar to the last” and then all you have to edit are the titles and whatever else may be different about the remaining pieces.  On the other hand, editing bits of information about the artwork that is already in your d-ART Gallery must be done on a piece-by-piece basis, and is very tedious.  I speak from experience (having just spent way too many hours updating my portfolio there).

Tomorrow: AbsoluteArts.com

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