All right, so I did a little bit of tweaking and added a gallery plugin to the site. So now site visitors can click the “Gallery” button on the menu bar, and they’ll be able to browse some of my story related artwork. Assuming I don’t get lazy about uploading new images I’ll probably add more over time. I’m not really experienced with web-coding or messing with PHP/CSS, but I think this is a serviceable enough way to show off my artwork.
For the time being, at least, I’ve included a sub-gallery for all my book covers so far, and an additional gallery specifically for story-related artwork; ie, character paintings, idle doodles, or scenes within something I’ve written. If that gallery gets too many images I might divide it into smaller separate galleries for different books, or based on subject. And I’ll add additional galleries if I see a need for it, maybe specific character galleries, or even fanart if that’s something that happens.
I’ll probably add a few more images over the next week or so if I find it’s worth displaying; the main reason it’s taking time is I have to apply the watermark, and since I recently changed my signature, I’ve been going over old digital pieces and updating them to have the new one.
I know some people don’t like it when artwork has watermarks, but I’ve been around the internet for a while, and I’ve seen art theft happen too much to just blindly throw all my work up without some kind of label. I’m aware that this isn’t a strong deterrent for theft, as anybody who really wants to steal the work is going to find a way to edit out my signature and watermark. The point is to make it much harder, and it’ll be all that much more obvious it was stolen because the labels will end up either being cropped or badly clone-stamped out. And I can at least point out “See? They cropped it; this was stolen off my site.”
And in the future, since I don’t always have a lot to talk about with writing, I may try to do more process blog posts about new art pieces going over how I made it or what inspired it.
