What do you do with your art work when you’re done with it?
Do you mount and frame it to hang in your home, or do you stick it in the closet with all your other pieces?
Use your computer and a digital camera to make a permanent record of all your art work.
This is a great way to preserve your work and make it all available at any time.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a beginning student, an advanced amateur or a working professional. Capturing your art and preserving it in a digital format allows you to track your progress and have available important information about each piece.
Where Should I Keep My Digital Record?
You don’t need to be a computer guru to save your body of work digitally. There are many free online websites for creating a blog, an album or a catalog of your work. You can even create your own website.
Cloud Computing
A digital album can be as simple as placing your images in a cloud-based server. Lots of online entities offer free or very modestly priced space on their cloud for individuals to use as they choose. This album of your photos is very basic, and you can access it from any computer with internet access.
With your images on the cloud, you can access them whenever and wherever you choose, and can transfer copies of them to another website, your computer or attach to an email.
Blog
A number of blog websites have free hosting and templates for you to create your own blog. With a blog, you can upload pictures and write whatever you like.
You can include all the information about your painting, including the title, size, materials used and any other information about your painting. You can even take candid snaps of your work in progress to include in the post.
If you enjoy writing, you can use the blog as an artist’s diary to record all your thoughts and ideas. You can include preliminary sketches or drawings you may have made, show photos of your reference material and talk about your experience creating your piece.
You can also include notes about different aspects of your painting. You may want to include your color recipes, type of support used and even the brushes you used to create a particularly interesting section of your painting.
If you’re taking a class, you can write about your impressions of the work you’re doing, what you’re learning and how you’re applying that knowledge to your painting. You can also write about the festivals you are part of, the galleries you’re showing in or interesting places you’ve been.
Online Art Galleries
There are lots of online art galleries that are free or minimally priced for artists of all kinds. You simply register and upload your images and information. These galleries can be just for viewing or in some you can make your pieces available for sale through the website.
Some online galleries have print on demand services, so you can sell reproductions of your work, or have your image applied to t-shirts, coffee mugs or mouse pads.
Why Should I Bother With An Online Presence?
This concept is really exciting and was outside the realm of possibility not so long ago. Maintaining a record of artwork was time consuming and could be expensive.
Taking clear photos with a good camera or hiring someone to take photos could be expensive. Then you needed to process the film in slide format and create a hand written or typed record of your work. After all this work, your information was still only available to you, unless the records and photos were duplicated and mailed to a potential gallery, art show or other interested party.
With the ease of today’s technology, you can make any information and all your artwork available to whomever you choose with just a few clicks of your keyboard. You can refer interested parties to your website or blog, send photo attachments with online submission documents for shows and festivals and self-promote your artwork to the world. You also have a record of your development, where you started and how far you’ve come.
Even if you never become a professional artist, creating an online journal of your trials, tribulations and triumphs as a struggling art student is something you can look back on and share with your family and friends.
Building Your Art Business
Even if you’re a rank beginner, you probably have dreams of becoming a ‘real artist.’ By using a computer and digital images to record you work and your progress, you’ll learn how to create an online presence. In today’s world, this opens you up to global exposure and a world-wide market.
Even if your first attempts are less-than-stellar, you’ll have an opportunity to build an attractive online presence as you learn how your site works and how to best manipulate it to incorporate your ideas. If you decide you don’t like a particular site, you can always move on to another. You have your digital images and can easily transfer them to your new site.
Your online site is a great way to promote yourself and gain a following. You can use it to show new work, inform your followers about upcoming shows you’re taking part in and generally promote yourself.
As an artist, you must wear many hats – creator, showman, salesperson and promoter. With an online site, you’ll be able to keep your business growing and expanding as your artistic skills grow.
