Artist Websites: How to Create One!

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professor Liu welcome to our video where we provide tips for visual artists today we are talking about how to create an artist's website welcome to the members of the Newton artists Association I was actually supposed to give them a lecture at this time tonight but because of the coronavirus we're doing it virtually if you would like to grow as an artist but you can't afford an art class or if you're trapped inside like most of us in the u.s. art prof has everything you need critiques and tutorials alright let's get started talking about how to create an artist website and if you're looking for a cheat sheet and you don't feel like taking notes we've done the work for you just go to our profit org you want to click on professional development click on artists websites and you will go to this page which has pretty much everything that I'm gonna talk about in today's lecture except with text in images so that'll be a good reference for those of you guys who need that alright let's get started the way I would think about your artist website it really is an archive it's the place where you show the breadth of your work as an artist and it's totally okay to have work on there that is several years old and I think what I really want people to understand about artists websites is what the relationship is between an artist website and their social media because ideally you really should have both for example social media is very different than a website social media is basically where everybody hangs out it's the day-to-day it's okay what is this artist doing this week what were they doing last week it's not what we're doing three years ago and so the website in the social media they really complement each other they go hand-in-hand and so if you don't have social media and a website I would definitely make sure that you start working on them between the two the one that's easier and faster to set up quickly is definitely social media a website takes longer because you have to build it you got to pick a platform and do all that stuff you could create an Instagram account in like five minutes so that would be very easy to do but ideal you definitely do want to have both welcome to all of you in the chat losado seacoast and zette is asking is it too young to have an artist website in high school absolutely not I know a lot of high school students who have artist websites but it's really up to you I mean in high school it's not necessary I would say in college you probably want to start thinking about it definitely by the time you're senior in college you want to have a website at that point and then working artists of course want to have a website if you want to use that for promotion by the way if you would like to get tips on social media for artists we do have this page on our profit org again just go to professional development you will find this page there I expect at some point I will do a stream on social media but today we're just gonna talk about websites okay the most important thing about site is to buy a domain name I know a lot of people don't like to pay for it because obviously if you don't want to pay for it you know it's like well I really don't want to but you know it's worth it okay if there's anything you're gonna spend money on for your website it's a domain name because once you have it you have it forever it's a really good investment I mean some networks you have to renew it every few years or so but once you get it you pretty much have it I think though what's tricky for some people trying to figure it exactly what their domain should be because there's a lot of little things you have to get around depending on what your name is for example if you're like me and you lucked out and there are not that many clever lose in the world it was very easy for me to get Clara lucam Lauren Welch as well Ellie Sherrod they're fine and so if you have just a simple name you can just do clara lucam that is the best easiest solution really easy to remember because it's your name the thing is not everybody has a name like that and I know some people have very long names or maybe they have a last name that's hyphenated and so what a lot of people do is instead of having a full-out name like Kathleen Jefferson Levinson which is way too long they will shorten it to something like kjl studio.com and that's just so much more manageable for people to do alright in the chat let's see Amaris is asking about knitting textiles and two portraits would that be considered to be art I don't know Amaris I mean I have to look at the piece I don't know exactly what it is but puck puck is saying you have it forever only for new it I lost my first domain to someone else when I forgot to the days of renewal yes I mean once you get there you got to hold on to it you don't want to just let it go but it is a really good thing to do losado is asking what you recommend using your artist name or your real name it's up to you I mean I know some people have a different name as an artist that they use professionally other than their real name I mean if you're going as Clara Lou professionally you should use Clara Lou because it does get confusing for people if they're not exactly sure what's going on okay now here's the difference if you get a domain name look at how clean it is Clara lucam versus Clara Luke's squarespace.com or Clara Luke weebly.com I got a lot questions from people about various platforms to recommend and there's a lot of them out there I know a lot of my students are using Squarespace it seems like they have a lot of nice clean templates that seem really well-suited for artists websites but I've also seen a lot of students use Weebly I know some people use Wix I haven't used any of them I'm on WordPress which actually I'm not gonna recommend because WordPress is a little bit complicated it's not very intuitive so I would recommend Wix Squarespace or Weebly but the thing is if you don't buy a domain name you end up with Clara lewd squarespace.com which is really long and big pain seacoast is asking which you recommend a calm or dot CA domain for a CDN website is there a benefit to having a country domain not that I know of I mean I think it's ok if you want to do that but I think calm is usually better known by a lot of people and let's seal asados saying for me most people I work with only know me as losado and not my real name all right well then that case I would use losado if that's the name that people are gonna really identify you in it that sounds like a better choice okay now if you have a name that's a little bit more common you can think about tacking on an extra word like Clara Lou art or Clara Lou illustration the only thing is you want to avoid having a word that's really specific like illustration because you don't know what you might be doing in ten years and let's say you do illustration for a few years and then you change your mind you end up doing something else then your domain name becomes a problem then it says illustration you're not doing illustration anymore so I think a better choice is Clara Lu art Clara Luce to do something that's really basic that can really be applied no matter what material you end up working in you don't need a blog blogs are over I had a blog for a very very long time and I actually just retired it a few months ago because all these other platforms have been taking over so don't worry about that that is not a concern for most artists I think an important thing on a website is to show that your site is active and that it's up to date because I can tell you if I go to a website and there's something really obvious that says this has not been updated in two years it makes me not want to look at the website so you want to make sure that something on the front page changes every now and then so people don't feel like oh this is a dead website and nobody's really taking care of that that's very important what I recommend do something that's a really simple change don't do something where you have to overhaul the design that's a big pain and so you'll see if you go to our profit org every now and then I just changed the video and that's extremely fast and easy for me to do and that way when people go to the site they know that it's actually being maintained by somebody actively Julie is asking what do you think about using a catchy name like your Instagram lawn for example instead of your real name I think it's probably better Julie to have your real name for your website domain because your website's a little bit more formal I think on social media the interaction is a lot more casual and I think typically speaking if I were an employer and I wanted to look at an artist I probably would look at their website first I would look at the social media but the website is more the formal version of you so in my opinion it would be much better to use your real name alright let's take a look at this next page so another simple thing you can do change the image on the home page because the homepage people are definitely gonna look at that you don't want to have them have to go deep into your website to notice that something has changed so if you go to the front page you just fix the image or better yet update the front page with an upcoming exhibition or something that's current that's a really good simple way to make that change because I know a lot of people they get really intimidated by how much work they feel they need to do on their website like oh every time I work on my website it's got to be this big thing it does not have to be sometimes I go to my website I change like one thing I add one thing to my resume and that's fine I mean that's all you need to do sometimes to maintain your website a lot of people ask me how often you should be updating things so let's look at this comparison between social media and your website now this is a huge generalization it does not work for every single artists but this is what I have noticed tends to work for the general average artist I would say on social media you probably want to post at least once a week I have not been doing that lately because I've been really really busy but I think once a week if you're just getting started is necessary so people don't forget about you you can post three times a week and I definitely know a lot of artists who post every day some people post multiple times a day but I think you got to be careful on social media because if you post too much then sometimes people get annoyed really quickly or if you post tons and tons all at once and then disappear for a month and then post twice and then disappear it's very inconsistent and so that's not a good idea either now your website is different your website you cannot touch it for two or three months and it's okay I do that a lot I can't remember the last time I updated my website but that's fine I don't think a website is the type of thing where people expect that it's oh it's being updated every week that's ridiculous I don't know anybody who updates their personal artist website every single week seacoast is saying I've heard you recommend including sketches and process in social media post would you advise the same level of involvement for a website I don't want to duplicate what I'm posting I think seacoast you can put some works in progress on your website but I think the vast majority of imagery should be your more finished work and social media really is the prime place to be posting works in progress I mean I have a few works in progress pieces on my website but they're definitely not the majority of images justice is saying you have any advice for an artist who creates erotic art trying to find a target audience and social media to direct them to a website well you have to find your audience justice I can't get into that right now because I would take another hour to explain but basically looking at hashtags looking at what other artists in the same area are doing that is very helpful like if you find somebody who has somewhat similar artwork and you look at how they post and what their strategies are sometimes you can really implement some of those strategies and I can find that very very helpful okay this is in general across the board on your website less is more whenever I review people's websites because I do consultations and people purchase critiques from me for their websites I would say 90% of the time I'm telling people to cut back it's really rare that I will look at an artist website and say oh you don't have enough you got to add all this extra stuff most of the time I'm telling people look you have the same information three times on all these separate pages and that just ends up being a lot of clutter and it's surprising how hard it is to make a really simple clean website it sounds like a very straightforward test but it really is not for example I see this all the time on artist websites people will put this on their front page hey welcome to my website feel free to look around contact me for any enquiries to inquire about any sales or commissions you'd like to do thanks for stopping by I mean really are you gaining anything from a sentence like this I mean obviously they're at your website they are stopping by you don't need to thank them for it and you saying contact me for in sales that is not going to make somebody want to buy your stuff I see that all the time when people want to buy artwork they have a very strong impulse to do it and you writing oh this is for sale and telling them they can ask about it that's not going to be the difference people really have their own ideas about selling work so statements like this do not help your website they really crowd things up quite a bit okay this is also very common where people are trying to give out one piece of information but they end up creating this big log of extra words that you just don't need if you look at the top bar it's seeing the exact same thing as the bottom link does so instead of writing to read Casey's resume click here just write resume embed the link that's all you need to do because I see this a lot on artists websites where people write click here you really should not have to write click here you really should just embed the link into the particular word that you're trying to direct their attention to by the way for those of you who are actively working on your artists website and you need customized assistance we do offer artists web site critiques and also Instagram critiques and that's basically a 30 minute video where I go through your entire website I make suggestions for what to do we have examples on our preferred org that you guys can watch because as much as I'm giving you basic advice for how to create your own artist website it's really specific to the artist so if you're a sculptor your websites gonna look really different than somebody who's a photographer and so for a lot of people they need that custom tailored advice so that is available if anybody is interested ok on your artist website use plain fonts this is not the place to play around with graphic design okay if you're a graphic designer and that's what your work is about that's a different story but I think most artists who have an artists website are not graphic designers and what happens is people get this need to express themselves through a font just don't do that resist the temptation because you end up with stuff like this okay now the top font you're looking at that is the font that I use across the board and all of my sites on art prov and it's a pretty straightforward font okay but if you look at the font in the middle you start getting a lot of ideas what do you look at that at least for me I look at that area and I just think oh ancient Roman Empire like why are you doing that and then if you look at font at the bottom I just think what Roaring Twenties like it's just a distraction you don't need you want people to focus on your artwork not on some funky font that you decided to choose so that is asking about paths for high school students to go to art school I would recommend that you go to our playlist we have a few playlists that are specifically about applying to art school so check that out all right let's talk about the artists resume because that is definitely something you want to have on your website but I think a lot of people are very confused about how to format the resume and what to actually put on it I think it's a really good idea put your resume on a separate page I see this a lot where people have an about page a contact page and everything's smushed together in one area the resume is not something you want cluttering up another page so usually I'll have a contact page and I'll have a link that goes to my resume will open up another page okay now the other thing is you don't want your resume as a PDF because if you have it as a PDF you can't embed links into the PDF and honestly a lot of people are not going around downloading your resume off of your website it's not really necessary and the other thing is if it's on a page then you can put all the links on there and also Google will pick up the text which is going to help you for SEO which is search engine optimization so if you have your resume it's in a PDF Google will not pick up any of the text in that PDF but it will if it's on a separate page please resist the temptation to pad your resume I know it's really really tempting everybody at some point has definitely done it myself included but it does not make you look better in fact I would say when I'm looking at an artist resume I can tell in like three seconds that oh my goodness this person is really trying to pad their resume a lot I would much rather see a resume that is shorter with higher quality items than one that's three pages long but half of it is stuff that really doesn't matter so really try to resist that temptation I know a lot of people do it because they worry oh no my resume is too short it makes me look bad but it doesn't your resume is what it is that's fine people are going to just look at it for what it is as opposed to you just adding so much extra stuff that it makes it hard for people to read through it and honestly when somebody's really padding it starts to come across as a little bit desperate so it's better for you to not do that puck puck is saying for the resume you recommend cutting it down to the basics I do but I'm gonna go over in a little bit some of the specifics about that see kosis saying I don't have anything faintly resembling a resume for my art is there anything I could include in place of that probably not I mean seacoast you don't have to have a resume on your website I mean your website's whatever you want it to be but I would say if you are applying for jobs in the arts field if you're trying to get galleries to look at your stuff you're gonna have to have a resume that's pretty much standard if people are looking at your work to show okay one thing you want to avoid is repeated exhibitions for example I have been teaching at RISD for sheesh over a decade now and every other year she has a RISD faculty biennial it's a show that they put on at the RISD museum at this point geez I must have been in like six RISD faculty biennials but the thing is I don't list it every single year because it feels a little silly to repeat that over and over and over again and yet I do see a lot of people do that so if you look at this image here you'll notice that every single year they're listing 22nd members exhibition 23rd members exhibition 24th members exhibition it just keeps going and going and I'm not saying you shouldn't include that show it's just you don't need to include it every single year if it's something that you're constantly participating in I have the faculty biennial it's on my resume but I think it's only on there twice or something so it's really not necessary it doesn't increase your chances of getting hired to have that repeated several times so I would just clean it up a little bit more pop puck is saying for the resume no description and eliminate specific dates I don't think you need a description of the jobs that you've had most of the time people will just list the position like gallery director and the list the gallery I think for your website you don't really need that if you are applying to a job and you're sending your resume directly to the employer then you might want to write a little bit of the paragraph about what your position was but on your website you don't really need that dates you need to keep because i'll tell you when i review artists resumes i always look at the dates because i want to know how recent the work is and i want to know how far back their experience goes so dates are definitely something that you don't want to leave out another thing about the artists resume if there is stuff that you just don't have it's okay i think a lot of people get very worried because they say oh well I've never done a lecture I've never been a visiting artist is that bad it's not I mean your experience is what it is I can tell you I went years without ever having done in Earth's residency I think I did an RNC for the first time three years ago and for the longest time that just was not a category on my resume and that's totally okay so don't worry if there are categories that you just don't have Julie Elle is saying what if you are just trying to sell art and not looking for a job well I think that the difference is if you have a resume I think for a lot of people it looks a lot more professional and I know that if I were somebody wanting to purchase artwork it's just a little bit more of a presentation thing where you just appear more trustworthy a little bit more legitimate I mean people are gonna buy what they want to buy but I think appearances do somewhat matter in terms of showing that you're not just some whack job on the internet seacoast is saying I wasn't very clear I don't have any art specifics perience work past shows that would normally be included in a resume prior to my recent work I hadn't picked art supplies in almost two decades how would I present what I have accomplished well in that case eCos if you really feel like there just isn't anything to put together as a resume just leave it off that's fine and then you can have other sections of your website which I'll go over in a little bit your about page or contact page and your gallery and as you gain more experience somewhere down the line you can put together a resume so don't stress because people have many different types of experience this is one way to do it this is more the expected typical artist website but like I said people do it in completely different ways so don't worry if you don't totally fit and to all the categories that I'm describing Marianna saying should I mention the private classes that I give or just my exhibitions I would put those on for sure you probably want to have a section that is called teaching experience because I do think that that is a good thing for people to know about you collections this is probably the place where people really pad their resume and its really obvious guys just don't do it I cannot tell you how many artist resumes I've seen where the collections look like this okay look at this I'm in the collection of Sam Lu and Sara Lou like oh that's a coincidence we've got the same last name I see that all the time the village Bank cafe harmony who is Terry Richards you'll just see these random names and so in my opinion you really shouldn't be putting together a collections area unless it's really legitimate collections like for example if you're in a museum collection if you're in the Boston Public Library if it's a major collector somebody who is well known like David Moog are David and Barbara Stahl I'm actually in their collection but they're not very well-known and so if you're in a situation like that what I usually do is I will link to some article about them because the stalls actually had an exhibition of their collection at the current regime many many years ago that my print was featured in and so I linked their names to that museum exhibition site so that way people knew okay this is a legitimate collection this isn't just my cousins who happened to have my stuff in their living room and again if you're not in any collections it's okay you don't need to have it in my opinion this is more embarrassing than not having a collection at all on your resume okay next let's talk about exhibitions now for exhibitions you need to make sure that you distill it down to the information that really matters because whenever I'm looking at an artist resume I skim it pretty fast and if the resume is just packed with all this extra information that does not really impact my opinion very much it's annoying and it gets in the way if you look at the slide on the top you'll see there's a lot of redundant information for example they're listing the month of the show they're writing two-person Invitational they're running site specific they're having all these things that don't matter like I don't care if the show was in September it doesn't matter to me I do care that it was in 2017 so definitely you want to include that but don't worry about the month saying things like site-specific that's not going to change my about the show so if you go down to the bottom you'll notice that I've removed a lot of the information that's at the top and it's just so much easier to read you want to make sure on your website that anything that can be linked should be linked for example in the resume oftentimes if I have a show at a gallery or nonprofit arts organization I will link to them I think that's a community thing as artists we know how much work it is to run galleries and keep a non-profit arts organization up and running and I think you're doing them a favor and they're supporting you as well if you had a show there it only makes sense to do that so anything you can link you teach other school you have a job at a gallery try to link to all of those places that's very useful the other thing is you want to embed the links so you don't ever want to put the actual URL into the site so you don't want to type out like HTTP it just looks really sloppy instead you just want to put the text at the bottom just say Arlington Center for the Arts you just embed the link into the text because those full out URLs they get very sloppy they just look really bad on your website puck puck is saying what if there's no site that can be linked from the CV well you don't have to I mean there's no site then there's no point in trying to do that you can just leave it as it is but it's just if you can if that's an option I definitely would okay this is also a little trick that makes a big difference so if you link to say an art gallery okay you want to format it in your website so if somebody clicks on the gallery link it will automatically open a new tab in your web browser okay this is important because the thing is if you don't do that and the person clicks on the gallery link all sudden they're off your site and they're on the gallery site and then for me at least within a minute I'm looking at pictures of Jennifer Lopez so you just want to keep them on your website so the idea is that if they click the gallery link it opens another tab and your website is still there so now there are two tabs open and it's really easy for them to pivot back to your website each platform will do this differently usually whenever you link to something it will give you an option in WordPress there's just a little checkbox and it just says open link and a new window check that off and you'll be all set to go that's all T person is saying if you're fresh out of art school don't have much work experience would it be fine just to have the homepage about any gallery that's fine I mean really if you guys feel like your resume is just too short to be bothered with that's okay but I do know a lot of people when they get into school they are looking for jobs and sometimes people will say oh send me your website and then all sudden you're going oh no I don't have my resume and my website I really need it there and then you're scrambling I think it's nice to have it there just so that when you need it it's available but also the thing is about your website to remember unlike social media your website's not gonna get a ton of traffic I think on social media it's a little bit different because people are active they're looking at stuff all the time my website doesn't get that much traffic I mean I'm sure it gets some but I think compared to my social media it's actually very little okay let's look at awards and again this is another place like collections where people tend to pad quite a bit if you have something like the top bar you got an honorable mention you were on the honor roll in your undergraduate program that's not really an award I feel like those are not so important to include whereas if you win an artist fellowship from your state cultural council if you win an award from your university if you win an artist grant those are awards okay honorable mentions on a roll that's not really something you want to put in your ward section and again like I did not win awards when I was younger I did not win a major grant until like two years ago so it's okay to not have an awards section that's not gonna make people think oh you're terrible artist they're just gonna maybe not even notice how you don't have it there okay let's talk about the contact Paige because the contact page is really important on your website if your contact page is difficult to find or if it's really confusing it can be the difference between somebody buying your artwork and not if you set up any barriers that make it even a little difficult for people they're not going to do it you got to make it as streamlined and as easy as possible and I see this all the time on contact pages three people say hey thanks for stopping by you can email me you want to chat for my Instagram check out my sketches progress shots on recent projects all that stuff it just gets in the way like if I want to contact you I don't care about all that stuff I just want the email and you can see the email is really buried within that area all right professional affiliations I think with professional affiliations this is definitely a category you do not need you could never have one ever under resume and it's fine but again I still see people doing this and I remember because I taught the Senior Seminar at RISD a few years ago and I had students listing RISD museum of art as a professional affiliation I was like guys know okay your student at RISD you are not professionally affiliated with the RISD museum of art same thing if you buy membership if you're a member of the Museum of Fine Arts that's not a professional affiliation a professional affiliation is something like you're on the board of a non-profit arts organization maybe you're in an artist co-op maybe you're in the monotype guild of New England and you had to be juried in for membership or maybe not it really depends on the artist group but those are professional affiliations and if you don't have a neat that's totally fine seacoast is saying how do i distinguish myself from artists that are popular on social media regardless of the quality of their work because I think a lot of it actually has to do with user engagement and what I would recommend you guys do is drawn in and I did a stream I think two days ago about how to make artist connections online and we get really specific about the logistics of how to do that because engagement is huge if you have wonderful work but you don't engage with anybody your social media is not gonna work a lot of people expect oh I set it up if I build it they will come they will not come I don't know who came up with that movie line it's just not true especially in terms of social media so you got to put yourself out there and start to really interact with people that's specific to social media that is not the case with websites websites are a completely different thing Hillary is asking about using a web form or an email address I'm gonna get to that I've got some examples to show you guys okay let's talk about education now I know some people go to art school some people do not I think regardless of where you did your degree if you did a degree you should put it down because I think what's really cool guys I've met so many artists who had long careers in something else and then Olson became full time artists after they retired from their position like I knew this person who is a physics professor for many many decades and did extremely well in that field now they're a full-time photographer and so it's okay to put down on your resume that you have a chemistry degree I think that's totally cool in fact for me I think that's extra cool but because then I look at the resume I'm like whoa this is so cool this person was in chemistry for three decades and now they're an artist so don't be worried if you don't have an art school degree that is not a problem but you should definitely put down the degree where you're at oh hello have you got somebody from Peru and homemade persons asking about drawing charcoal in bulk I don't think it's necessary I mean unless you're drawing a lot which most people do not but I don't know maybe you're one of those people when you are putting down your education though again don't Pat it there's a lot of stuff that people put in for example if you look at the top it says honor roll four years in a row GPA 3.9 that's cool I'm glad that you did so well but you know what when I'm looking at your resume I just want to know did you get the degree that's the most important thing so all this onerous thesis semester abroad stuff you don't need to put it there I really think that just the degree and the major that's totally enough because look at how much better and cleaner this is I put down European Honors Program because that's a particular program at RISD that I was in but look at this 2004 MFA in painting Boston University that's all you guys need don't clutter it up with lots of extra information okay let's go over the contact page a lot of people have these contact forms on their website some people have the contact form and their email some people include their phone number or their address my feeling is that you really don't need to have your phone number there I don't like to have my phone number there because it's a privacy thing for me it depends on you it's your personal experience and choice my feeling about contact forms is that number one I have never filled one out and number two I always feel like they're not going to a person I feel like if I were to fill it out it would just go into space and disappear and so I feel like I am more confident about contacting somebody if I'm actually sending something to any email some people say oh okay well I won't have both but I guess my argument is well if you think the contact form is going to work then why do you need the email and vice-versa so again these are all personal choices I'm just telling you based on my own experience because one thing that I did a lot when we launched our profit org was I did something called usability testing which is basically where you have somebody sit down in front of your website and you have them click through it as if they just were visiting but the difference is you asked them to tell you what they're thinking out loud and it's really really interesting if you ever have a chance to do usability testing it's incredible the things that I thought oh this is totally obvious and the could not figure it out so that's a really good test to see if things are actually working I think it's better to just have your email and put your social media none of that extra stuff however you can do better than this this is fine this will work however to me this is better now the difference is that in this slide we've got the icons for the social media they're very well known they're colorful they're a lot more attractive people can see them really well and you'll notice in the email that I have at in parenthesis one of the reasons you want to do that is because if you look at the previous slide I just wrote up my email just as it is but here if you have the parentheses that basically prevents bots from picking up your email and spamming you so you'll see that often times on people's websites they don't have the full-out email address they have the parentheses and that's the reason why people do that so ultimately I think this is all you really need on your contact page okay another thing that is really good on your actual email address is to link your email address so that it opens a new email window usually in the web hosting platform you're using it the link is mailed to Clara at our profit org and that will open a new email browser because I'll tell you so many times when I want to email somebody it drives me crazy when I try to click on the email and it's not linked and I'm like oh I got a cut and paste it and I know that's extremely Petty and really lazy but it's like again it's like one more little thing that you're making people do whereas if you just click and then an email browser just opens it's so easy to send that email and so if you can make that happen that's a big difference okay I do recommend on your website that every page should have an image even if you don't technically need one I think images keep people engaged and it just looks better for example if you have a page like this and it's just text it just looks dull and it's not difficult I think just to throw one image in fact what somebody said earlier about putting on a work-in-progress image this might be a good place to do that because this is not a gallery but you also want to keep people interested by putting something visual that they can actually engage with okay let's talk about your about page the about page is important because it's not the same thing as your resume your resume really is the nuts and bolts of your career the about page is more personal this is how you want people to know you as a person and I do think today people really care about that they want to know who you are beyond just the artwork I do think it's important that at the very least on the about page there is one photo of your face I know a lot of people are very self-conscious about this I think that you have to get over it because if you don't show your face anywhere on the website I think for a lot of people it feels like they don't know who they're looking at and it just feels a little bit evasive here's an example my daughter wanted to take this cartooning class at this continuing education place and there were two cartooning classes and of course I googled both of the instructors career-wise they weren't that different from each other and so to me it wasn't a huge difference which one I chose but I just was sort of curious so I googled one this instructor had a website they had social media and everything but every sign I looked at I could not find a single photo of that instructor the other instructor had like a nice professional photo of themselves on their website take a wild guess who I went with it's shallow but it's true it's like you want to know this is an actual real person see Coase is saying image headers and banners used to be all the rage would you suggest that images be in the body of the page or the header and banner it really depends seacoast I've seen it done in a lot of different ways I think the important thing is that the information that's most critical is at the top because I've seen sites where you go to the homepage and you have to like scroll down to actually get the information and you don't want that you want people to get the information the second they hit the page and the scrolling is like a little extra icing on the cake thing it should not be where the critical information is let's see F Kosh saying what resolution would you recommend for gallery images I think you don't want to have images be super high resolution because you don't want people to be able to download a super high resolution image of your artwork so I usually do an image for pixels it's usually like 1366 by 768 that it makes it so that your website's really hard to load that can be a problem because if your website takes too long to load people will leave in like two seconds pop-up I'm gonna get to watermarking so I have a slide to talk about that later okay now the thing is if you really don't want to do like a headshot image get somebody to take a picture of you in the studio that's a nice way for you to not be so like oh my gosh high school yearbook photo type of thing and I think these are nice because they actually get to see working with your materials and it's a nice intimate way for the visitor to get to know you I really do not recommend this I see this all the time on websites where people have a self portrait painting a character design something that is a part see fartsy portrait this is not a good idea guys make it professional I mean I think the studio portrait is a really good compromise if you don't want to have one that's a little bit more straightforward there's no correct way to do this it's just when you have no photo I think it feels really anonymous okay a friendly photo it's just it's more accessible like when you look at this page you just say okay this is the artist I knew who they are just picture going to this page and having no photo of the artist and reading about them it's a little bit strange so I would definitely just get over it guys most people do not care about how you look and stuff like that if you're an artist it's not like you're an actor and you're trying to get a movie part so don't worry about that okay your about page should also have a written statement of who you are that's written narrative ly because this is where you get to show a little bit about your voice because in the resume there's no voice it's just this is what I did this is my job that's it here's where you can really tell people about who you are so that they get a sense of your personality a little bit and the way you write it makes a really big impression on the people that are visiting your website for example I could write my bio like this hey guys I teach our Risty I made this website called our prof portraits and figure drawings are what I love the most in my spare time I like reading gardening and hugging my guinea pig Bubba all those things are true okay none of that is made-up or anything but I think you guys can probably tell for somebody like me to write a statement like that it's a little embarrassing like I sound like a really young and experienced person and for me I would not want to be represented that way on the flip side I have definitely seen sites with stuff like this Clara Lou's a renowned artist who has won numerous awards across the region and I just can't stand it when people have testimonials riveting and beautiful figure paintings that reflect the innermost essence of a 21st century life like really like who do you think you are okay because you know something the artists who really are that well renowned and who are that successful they don't write this on their website they just have their website so I think when people write stuff like this it just comes across as desperate and like you're puffing yourself up to be something you're not so I really don't advise this approach to your bio this is the one that I have it's more factual and I think if you don't really know what tone of voice you want to adapt a more factual one tends to be on the safer side because I think for most people who are watching the stream you probably want an artist website for some professional reason most people don't put it together for fun although I don't know maybe some of you guys are but my assumption the people that I consult they really are trying to make a career of that and so if you write something that's more factual I'm an adjunct professor RISD I'm a partner our prof. my studio practice uses drawing printmaking and sculpture as a means towards exploring the extremities of human emotion using the figure in the face so the idea is that this statement it sums me up really quickly but in a narrative format that just is friendlier than the actual resume Mac says speaking of oneself in third person always sounds a bit pretentious yep I would say that seacoast is saying I've images of you hugging Bubba a lot that should be april's our prop there actually this is really sad the Bubba died a year ago that's not really true anymore I should add fluffier Jubjub or wheat because they're alive right now anyway that salty person is saying the second about example looks like those blurbs at the back of the chip bags awesome I love that artist faina saying to write the about page from the third person or the first I don't think it matters I mean I see people doing both I like to do first because I feel like it's a little bit friendlier third person can work I mean if you talk about yourself as a pro now into artists that's a little bit silly but you can write Clara Lou is an adjunct professor at RISD I don't think one is better or worse it just depends on what you prefer personally don't worry seacoast it's my fault for having an out-of-date slide in this lecture okay moving on let's talk about photographs one of my colleagues said this to me a few years ago he said artists live and die by their photographs sounds dramatic but guys is true okay because 95% of the time people are going to see your artwork on a screen before they're gonna see it in person if they ever see it in person in fact that's sort of a rare experience and so for that reason you have to imagine that the photographs that you shoot if your artwork are critical they are essentially representing who you are to the world and so you have to take the time to shoot clean accurate photos of your artwork little things matter like you look at these two photos of this sculpture you can see the croppings weird the one on the left the backgrounds too dark the whites are really blown out and the thing is the photo on the right it didn't take longer to shoot but it took more time in terms of really thinking through okay what are some of the things that I really need to prioritize backdrops really matter for photos especially of 3d work 3d artwork is very hard to photograph well if you don't know what you're doing and we do have a page on our top org about how to photograph artwork a basic guide and we also have another page that talks specifically about 3d artwork because the thing about this stuff you guys it's not difficult but the thing is if you don't know these tricks they're really hard to figure out on your own so we've done the work for you so you don't have to reinvent the wheel busy backdrops look terrible if you take a picture of your sculpture there's all this crap in the background makes it really hard to see the sculpture well sometimes if you have a backdrop where there's this like really obvious horizon line the wall is why the table is brown that's also really distracting you want it really clean so we can see the artwork like if you look at this piece you got a nice clean white background all you're looking at is the sculptor you're not looking at anything else and that's very important in photos of your artwork all right let's talk about watermarks on images I've seen a lot of people do this so if you look at the image on the right hand side you see I've written Clara lucam over it as a watermark I know a lot of artists do this because they're worried about people stealing their artwork online and I can tell you the only way you can a hundred percent make sure nobody steals your artwork is to never post anything online and I'm guessing since you're watching this dream that is not really something you want to do and I can also say if I saw an image and there was a watermark on it honestly I would just if I wanted steal it I would just Photoshop it out it would not be that difficult some people put the watermark in little letters at the bottom great I'll just crop it out the thing is the people that want to download your stuff they will and I know people put my stuff all over the place I don't know why but people always seem to want to put a poem over my drawings and then we seem to want to tweak the color and make it very blue or a purple or something like that and yeah that's annoying but the thing is nobody's making money off of that so I just let it go now if target took one of my drawings I don't know why they'd want to do this and put it in a t-shirt line and made hundreds of thousands of dollars then I'm gonna call my copyright lawyer but for these people that want to put poems on it whatever I would not put the watermarks on I think they're really tacky looking they make it really hard to see the artwork so I recommend not using those okay if you have an artwork that you know is definitely black and white but let's say you shoot a photo of it and the color balance was a little bit wrong go into Photoshop and just desaturate it make it black and white it just evens things out it's a little extra step you can do to make the image a little bit more clean if you can afford it a DSLR camera and a lighting kit it's a really good investment now I know not everybody can afford that but I can tell you if you want to work professionally as an artist if you're going to art school and you want to make this a career you're not gonna photograph your artwork once and be done you're gonna be doing it a lot and the lights that I bought I think I bought them in art school which was a long time ago once you have that lighting kit you have it forever and actually you can get a pretty good DSLR camera used for not that much money now and so if you can afford it that's great to have but I can also tell you that honestly the smartphone's that they're making now are such good quality I mean I'm amazed at the quality for the longest time I didn't really pay attention to it that much because I would just shoot everything on my DSLR camera but the thing is once got an iPhone 10 everything changed I was like wow these photos look so good and so when I used to photograph images for social media I used to use my DSLR I never use it now the only time I use the DSLR is if I'm shooting video or if I want to shoot photos for like a print catalog like something that has to be really high-quality I would say like 90% of the time I'm using my iPhone 10 so I would say that is definitely worth the investment Saturn dawn saying finished my first painting since I was kids the timing of this stream is neat time to create my artist website for my single painting well you know sometimes it's good just to get it up and running and you don't have to tell anybody about it and a lot of these platforms you can build it and keep it private until you're ready to make it public because the thing about a website you can't do it overnight I know some people say oh I did and I'm like okay I'm sure you did but I'm not so sure about the quality if you throw it up overnight so it is a good thing to have in progress just so that you have to do it right away because a lot of times in art school I've these students who get really panicked and they send me email Clara what do I do these people they want a website I don't have one I'm like well get to it you're gonna have to get started at some point okay on your website you got to make sure that any social media account that is on your website that it's actually active for example if you are on LinkedIn and it's got a resume from six years ago that's not gonna look so good if you have an Instagram and we open it and your last post was from eight months ago I'm not gonna want to look at it same thing with your Facebook page if your Facebook page has not been updated in two years that's not good it's much better to just take those off entirely and also say not all social media is helpful for example I would say for most artists people really are using Instagram that's really the platform that most artists are using I know people use Pinterest but Pinterest is a little bit different because we you go to somebody's Pinterest you see all their collections and the stuff that they're looking at and I find that very distracting because if I go to this I start thinking Oh plants bracelets and then I'll son I'm not thinking about the artists anymore and so Pinterest I don't think that's a good idea to put it on your social media because it just starts getting people looking at other things and we all know Pinterest is like a big rabbit hole like once you get on that site you're not going anywhere else because there's just so much stuff to look at Amanda saying do we need our own website is a Instagram bahan some other public forum okay I would say definitely your own website I have a bee hunts because RISD gave it to all the alums and the students nothing has ever come through on be hunts same thing with LinkedIn LinkedIn I think is a little bit better if you're in another industry I have not found it helpful for artists and Instagram you need to have but really you guys you need to have your own website if you want to work professionally and again ultimately this is all your decision if you're in a place where you're like me I really can't do it this will tie me over I would say bare bones have an Instagram definitely have that but ultimately you do want to have an artist website Mac is asking what's your opinion on suffixes for sites and social media Clara Lou fine art Clara loose studio they all seem overused and yet the name alone doesn't imply content Mac I think it's fine I think that for some people it makes more sense especially if they have a very common name I'm not bothered by that I feel like people don't usually stumble upon your website by accident usually they already have seen me on social media or I met them in person I gave them my website it's not very often that people will go to my website not knowing already that they're going to be looking at an artist website seacoast is saying Pinterest reminds me of having to look through relatives photo albums on the annual visit yeah it's just that's not where you want people to go people are so easily distracted that you just don't want to give them another opportunity to do that videos are not always helpful to have on your website guys I know some people think Oh vu that's great that will make me look really good not the videos really poorly made and I've seen this where I've gone to an artist website and it's just a really badly produced video and there's terrible sound and it's too dark or it's like really corny and not very well produced I would rather not see any video than see that because it's supposedly hard you guys to produce a video that's not awful I know that sounds terrible but it's true it's so easy to make a terrible video and you actually need quite a bit of experience to make one that's even half decent so I would just say for videos don't go there unless you really have the experience I have a video on my site but it's professionally produced and we know what we're doing here at our profit videos so it's okay for us let's see that salty person saying is it fine to link to social media if it has a lot of old art when you first got started yeah I think that's fine as long as you're currently updating it I mean my Instagram goes back many years that's fine but I am updating it every now and then Smitty is asking about business cards he on Smitty the only time I have found business cards helpful is if I go to a conference or I go to a convention or an event and I can give somebody in my business card but actually I think the quicker things that I do now is everybody just without their smartphone and they say oh are you on Instagram and they just put you in there like you're actually more likely for me to remember you if I put your Instagram on my phone then if you give me a business card the business card I lose it now I'm always like where did that go and especially at a conference there's so much going on there's all these things you're collecting and so I think it's actually better to do it like that or another thing you can do is you can email that person maybe a week after the conference and then you're in their email and that also tends to be better let's see mandus Singh what's your opinion on using square space or Wix I have not used Wix before I barely touch Squarespace a lot of my students happen to like it so I would say that that's a good recommendation and artist faina is saying is Google Sites too simple I have never used Google Sites before so I'm not really sure but I think that Squarespace and wicks and Weebly should take care of it for you Julie wants to know about blogs said they're not needed anymore but I thought it improved the SEO not really unless your blog is really active and has high readership it's not really gonna help you very much and also blogs are work I mean it's really hard to get high readership I started getting a lot of readership when I started writing my column asked the art professor and people were going there for help and stuff but I think your average artist blog it's really hard to get high readership for that okay artwork categories I will get to all your questions you guys I'm sorry there's just so many of you here which is wonderful but I want to make sure we keep moving artwork categories it's important for you guys to think about how you're going to present your artwork because it's actually hard to do this and does take some time to work out for example some people get really excited about posting everything they ever made don't do that okay if you have too many categories like this if you put nine categories on your website people get overwhelmed really fast they go oh my god there's so much to look at and it's funny because it makes them not want to look at it on the other hand if you have categories that are really unrelated that's really confusing for people because if I go to a website and it's like illustration graphic design in architecture I look at that I'm like who are you like I don't know anybody who works well professionally in all three of those fields it's just no chance so not a good idea to do that you want to have the categories be related for example if you're a fine artist and you have drawings paintings and sculpture that makes sense to people because they're similar but also distinctive at the same time some people like to organize their artwork by bodies of work I do that because my work is so over the place in terms of media that if I try to organize by media my website would be a mess so if you go to my website really easy Clara lucam you'll see it is organized by bodies of work ok let's see Zed Bal d'amour is saying should we focus on our strongest pieces or should we show the range of skills by posting various styles and mediums I think probably for the website your strongest work and you probably do want it to be fairly cohesive it depends on where you are like an art school student I would not expect you to have a super cohesive polished website but I do think that cohesion is more what you're looking for and let's see seacoast saying I think it's important to review the terms of service whichever site you choose as some limit what kind of content they'll host yep for sure definitely read through all that stuff and thank you to those in the chat who are answering questions that I can't answer because I have never used Wix before ok you also in your menu bar you don't want to have ambiguous words this happens a lot if you write installation that's really confusing for some people because for some people installation means installation art other people it might be a picture of their painting installed into a gallery space if you're right prints you don't know is that a hand pulled print is that a print of a photo that's somebody's shot of your painting and then work it's like okay well what work like I don't know what type of work you make so you've got to be really careful about the words that you use because otherwise people get really confused really fast menubar really really big one guys don't mess up your menu bar because if your menu bar does not work your website's not going to work so I would say on the menu bar make sure you're using this same format for all the links so if you say okay works on paper that talks about media but then you say 2019 prints that's weird because all sudden you're talking about dates and then up and out could be anything maybe it's a body of work and then you have archive guys don't put archives on your menu bar basically what that screams is old stuff it's not interesting nobody wants to see something which is marked old even if it is all don't mark it as archive just put it in your gallery and that will be totally fine Smitty is saying why is the stuff never talked about in classes well I can tell you I covered it in my senior seminar that I taught at RISD but I was sort of an anomaly I think oftentimes it is not covered but these logistics are important and they're not things that are fun to figure out by yourself I know that because I did okay so on the menu bar don't put on too many items because once you start having like 6 7 or 8 items on the menu bar people get really overwhelmed so if you say portfolio recent by own statement contact info and like people are so overwhelmed by that don't do that okay all right on the menu bar make sure you don't have something that's totally not related to your art practice I think it's much better to create a separate site if you do something else that's not related to your artwork oh sorry for the typo on that slide anyway like if you're an artist but you also happen to be a yoga instructor that's great but don't put yoga on your menu bar like it just is really strange it looks really out of place I've seen this a lot I mean if you really feel like your art audience wants to know about you is a yoga instructor and you think that's really helpful you can I mean all this is your decision ultimately but I find it very distracting because then I click on that and I start looking at yoga classes and then I'm not thinking about the artwork anymore okay this is a better menu bar if you have let's say five items contact about drawing painting printmaking that's all you need really try to keep it to very very few items as much as you possibly can Amanda's saying best piece of advice for some of you doesn't go to art school you go to brown not receive yeah okay cool all right think we won over this earlier Bunning uh say this again compress your image files there is a setting in Photoshop save for web and what that does it compresses the image files so that way the images don't take like an hour to load on your website I mean that is pretty much the fastest way to get somebody to leave your website if it takes like three seconds to load I'm out of there so make sure you compress the images so that they're very easy to do don't stack your artwork images I can tell you from observing people doing usability testing people hate scrolling and I know it's really petty because you're like really it's not hard to scroll everybody who I tested got so annoyed when they had to scroll so basically if you have a page that's supposed to be a gallery and you have like image 1 2 3 4 like stacked and then you have to scroll up and down to see all the images don't do that because it's just too much work for people I know that sounds silly but next time watch your own behavior on a website I think you'll see that a lot of us are like that I think a thumbnail gallery is a lot better because if you look at the thumbnail okay we got 12 images and you can see them all at once without ever scrolling another thing you can do with the thumbnails is you can have the thumbnails be like a piece of the artwork so that way when people click on the thumbnail and then they open it up to the actual artwork they're seeing something new because if you show the entire or work in the thumbnail it's a little bit less exciting because then you're not seeing something different but thumbnail galleries are great these are really really good to do okay you can do some nail galleries anyway though I mean this is song Kang and she actually is doing a bunch of tutorials for us beautiful pen drawings and you can see hers is not a grid like the last one we saw but I think it looks great for her website so there's a lot of different ways you can do those thumbnail galleries artist statement we all love writing these right no I mean I always find the artist eight Menai veronik thing it's like well we are here because we like to express ourselves visually not because we love writing but unfortunately it is something you should have and if you guys need help writing an artist statement go to our playlist on career advice for artists and we have a whole video that covers how to write an order statement because it's a little bit more involved than what I can do right now but this is a great artist Ament this is by a llame and she is a former student of mine you can get her link to her website in the video description and all the artists who I mentioned they're all in the video description below but this is an excellent artist statement it's really short and you can tell exactly what her work is you see pinch and coil techniques organic wabi-sabi feel slow process of hand building ceramics subtle detail time and intention into each piece another thing about the artist statement keep it short I know on some artists rent proposals they're like write five pages you don't need to do that on your website I would say one maybe two paragraphs but not more than that because people don't read stuff it's like if I see that it's four paragraphs I just won't read it I mean there's a reason why we have TL DR too long didn't read it because people don't like to read things on the web so you got to keep it really short Smitty is asking why do our statements refer to the artisan third person they don't always I sometimes write mine in first person so it's sort of the same thing as the about page it's your decision which one you want to do just don't write something like this guys like these are statements driving me crazy because they're just so pretentious and they don't make any sense to me like if you try to read the statement particular focus in different performative modes of art making is it a time to promote bodily inter species intercultural live and cow I mean if anybody the chat can explain to me what this heart statement is actually saying you'll get a prize because I have no idea what this artist is up to from reading the statement I find a statement like this very frustrating okay very important edit if you have typos in your website and really obvious errors that's not gonna reflect well on you I recommend getting another person to look at it because at a certain point you've looked at your website for so long that you no longer see those mistakes so have a second person take a look at it and I want to remind you guys if you need something more customized on your website we do offer artist website critiques these are 30-minute videos I just go through your website tell you what I think needs to be fixed you can look at examples watch some of these on our website purchase an artist website or Instagram critique and I hope you guys will explore more of our free resources over at art profit org lots of stuff which is not available on our YouTube channel and I hope you will also subscribe to our channel and join the art pro family thank you so much to our top patreon supporters who do such a great job keeping us up and running I would say guys if you have a question post it as a comment after this video gets posted because I got to close out the stream and I will see you guys next time thanks for watching

Channel: Art Prof: Create & Critique

Views: 5,625

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: art critique, art critique example, artist critique, artist critique example, critique art, critique artwork, high school artist, how to critique art, how to critique art example, how to critique art for students, how to critique art in class, how to critique artwork, how to critique artwork example, how to talk about artwork, ceramic sculpture, ceramic sculpture ideas, pastel portrait, pastel portrait drawing, soft pastel portrait, soft pastel portrait drawing

Id: QiKCxJ5P3eQ

Length: 75min 5sec (4505 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 19 2020