Portfolio websites or blogs for artists

Having your own portfolio online is great for showcasing your work to your audience, especially your potential clients.

There are many websites and services online you can choose from.

Portfolio websites vs blogs for hosting images

Blogs are great tools to inform your readers that you have a new piece of work. They work like journals and your latest posts always floats to the top and front of the page. But blogs may not be the appropriate solution for your portfolio website.

Blogs aren't formatted to present images, or galleries of images. However, if you're using a paid domain with your own blogging software (e.g. Wordpress), there are image gallery plugins you can install to turn your blog into an image gallery. It will take some work for you to tweak the blog into a gallery.

Blogs however, make very good companion websites to your portfolio, by letting your readers know whatever projects you're currently on.

Generally, you should go for a service that is dedicated to creating an online portfolio. You can check out ArtOrder for a list of some portfolio websites.

List of art portfolio sites

These are the ones I like.

Carbonmade is a simple online portfolio. You can create galleries for specific categories of your work. It presents art in a slideshow with thumbnails style.

ConceptArt.org is a popular online community dedicated to creating concept art. The audience there is very focused, and you can be sure they are looking for concept art when they are there. The downside is you still have to market your own work. The search and discovery feature is lacking so readers might not be able to find your work unless they already know your URL. Portfolio features are lacking.

deviantArt is another popular online art community. You can host your work there for free and create your own galleries. It's an extremely busy place so you can be sure there's a lot of audience. Note that hotlinking is not allowed, so you won't be able to grab your image URL and post it on your blog.

Flickr is not just a website for hosting photos, but many artist use it to host art work as well. You can create your own categories (called sets). Page layout is clean so any work featured is prominent. The free account can be quite limiting in the long run, but the paid account is a good investment. Hotlinking is allowed, and encouraged.

CGPortfolio is under CGSociety. It's similar to ConceptArt.org but the work featured are mostly computer generated graphics. Portfolio features are lacking as well.

Others

What are your favourite portfolio hosting sites? Share them in the comments below.