Website: when venturing into a career in visual arts, it’s almost essential to not rely solely on social media to host your work. It’s pertinent to invest in a domain that is controlled by the artist. There are many domain hosting services and website builders available to use such as wix, square space, go daddy and many more. Most of these include easy to use website builders and support for e-commerce.
Social media: social media accounts should be used to display processes and engage with potential interest holders. It should act as a space for discovery and rarely be used as your sole space to display and sell work. Social media acts as a great tool to engage new clients, answer client enquiries and redirect people to your website. Different platforms offer different niches.
Use of images: it important when uploading images, to ensure that images you use can be traced back to you. Watermarking may not suit everyone’s style but it acts as a first line of defence against misuse and theft. Using compressed formats for images rather than high resolution is recommended online. Disabling right clicks and blocking screenshots work as good deterrents as well.
Copyright: it can be hard to copyright everything you may choose to share on the internet, but simply maintains original files with their created date can act as evidence in case of infringements. Sharing low resolution images on platforms can also date stamp your creations.
Terms and conditions: it is recommended to invest some time when setting up a creative practice to engage and create a privacy policy and terms and conditions for users visiting your website. The strength of these vary from region to region, but can be upheld if legal action is required.
Image cloaking tools: in the recent claims of AI models copying works from vast digital spaces, image cloaking tools are an interesting option to investigate. Tools such as glazing and nightshade are generating interest. For individual artists, using the glaze tool is recommended.