Painting 'plein aire'
I've got to be completely honest, I've talked about creating a website for at least a year and dreaded the thought of how much time and effort it would require, especially since I'm not a 'computer geek,' nor do I especially enjoy spending time on the computer. I did some preliminary research perusing many artists' sites that I admired and noted their site hosts, their color schemes, layouts, bios, etc. I compared the cost of each host and made comparison spreadsheets. I looked at the comments that artists made about their hosts, and especially focused on whether the host had reliable customer service and how simple the website was too develop.
I finally took the plunge on Mother's Day this year and decided to host my site with the Fine Art Studio Online, aka FASO. Once I familiarized myself with FASO's site, I was surprised at how easy it was to use the website template for adding artwork, artist statements, and images. I was also able to give my site some character and refine it a bit. The most time consuming decision was determining and creating a color scheme. The artist websites that use a black color scheme are quite striking and elegant, but there seems to be a saturation of this color scheme, so I decided to develop my own color scheme in order to have some uniqueness even while using a template.
After deciding on the color scheme, adding the artwork was the next major decision, and a little time consuming since I was limited to 25 pieces of artwork. After getting these major decisions out of the way, it took me about 2-3 days to fully-develop my site so that I'm satisfied and happy with it. Surprisingly, developing my website has not been the chore that I dreaded, nor the time drain that I expected and in fact has been rather fun and a project that I've enjoyed. I hope you enjoy looking at my website as much as I enjoyed creating it. Now back to painting....
