Sharing your drawings online

An artist's page is the simplest useful thing on the web: some drawings, a few words about them, and a way to get in touch. It is also easy to do badly, usually by showing too much, reproducing it carelessly or keeping no proper record of what was posted. The craft of putting work online is mostly about respecting the work.

Decide what the page is for

A portfolio and a sketchbook are different pages with different rules. A portfolio shows a small number of finished pieces chosen to say one thing clearly, and anything that does not support that is a distraction. A sketchbook is generous, chronological and forgiving, and its value is in showing process and volume. Both are worth having. Mixing them into one undifferentiated gallery serves neither.

Getting a good reproduction

Flat work on paper belongs on a scanner if it fits, at a resolution high enough that you could print it, saved once as a master file that you never edit. Work too large for the scanner gets photographed: even light from two sides, camera square to the work, no flash, and a grey card or a white sheet in one frame so you can correct the colour afterwards. Straighten and crop to the edge of the image, correct the white point so the paper looks like paper, and resist the temptation to sharpen heavily, which coarsens pencil and ink.

Files and sizes

Keep a master at full resolution in a lossless format and export web copies from it. Line work and flat colour keep their crispness in a lossless format designed for graphics, while photographs of painted work usually look better and load faster as a good quality lossy file. Export at a size sensible for a screen rather than the full master, and give each file a name you can still understand in years: title, medium, date of completion, version. Never overwrite a master with a resized copy.

Captions, credit and sequence

Every image deserves a title, a medium, a size and a date. Those four lines turn a picture into a record and are the first thing anyone reusing or writing about the work will want. Sequence matters too: put the strongest piece first, group work that belongs together, and give each image enough space that the eye does not compare it with its neighbour before it has seen it.

Rights, watermarks and reuse

Say plainly on the page what people may do with the images. A short line stating that the work is yours and that reuse needs permission, or a clear licence if you want to allow some uses, prevents most misunderstandings. Watermarks are a trade off: a small mark in a corner is easily cropped, and a large one across the middle ruins the picture for the viewer you actually want. Posting at screen resolution rather than print resolution protects more effectively than a watermark and costs the viewer nothing.

Keep your own archive

Hosts close, platforms change their terms and links rot. Keep the masters, the web exports and the caption text together in folders on your own storage, backed up in two places, organised so that you could rebuild the whole gallery from scratch. Then update the page slowly and steadily: a few good pieces added regularly, with dates, is what makes an artist's page worth visiting twice.