Kenneth Dickson bought a camera many years ago to take photographs of his travels around Taiwan. After four cameras and thousands of photographs, he finally decided to take up photography full-time. Thanks to Galeryst.com he is delighted to bring you his virtual gallery! You can see his other images at Look Through the Lens.
Many artists use Galeryst to augment their existing online and offline presence and one such artist is Maya Hirasawa（平澤）Brauer. You can see the link to the virtual gallery on the homepage of the HRSWstudio site.
Maya Hirasawa Brauer of HRSWstudios is a visual artist working across a diversity of media, with a foundation in drawing and painting. Born in Tokyo amongst the bright neon lights and character faces, their work lies somewhere between cute and unsettling.
Maya describes this work Play with Me:
Created as an extension of a drawing I created at a residency in Netherlands, De Ateliers, “Play With Me” currently lives in Florida with collectors. This painting is an exploration of human sexuality and power dynamics, hidden under the sunny disposition of vibrancy and pulsating lines on a green field.
In December, Galeryst launched something new, Creative Coding, an add-on for Adobe Express that allows anyone to create graphics in Adobe Express with a block-based coding tool. Adobe Express is an easy-to-use web-based design tool that can help you create anything from a flyer to an Instagram post, from a website to a video. If you have a gallery on Galeryst, you can easily access it in Adobe Express to get images of your gallery and artwork in it using the Galeryst add-on for Adobe Express.
Creative Coding runs inside of Adobe Express and provides blocks (built with Google’s Blockly toolkit) that represent many of the visual elements and operations that you can do within the graphical canvas of Adobe Express.
In addition to blocks specific to Adobe Express and general programming concepts, we have added a category of blocks to access imagery and artwork details from galleries on Galeryst. This would enable you to create a catalog of artwork, a series of Instagram posts highlighting your artwork in your gallery, or any sort of graphics for your artwork that you are displaying in Galeryst.
Here is a simple example of how you might start coding a page that lists all the artwork in your gallery:
Though Creative Coding is meant for beginner programmers, it creates JavaScript code that could be used directly in building an Adobe Express add-on. With a guided learning plan (with a printable certificate created at completion) and lots of help content we wanted to make something that can be used in classroom, at home, or by anyone who wants to learn how to code with graphics. We released it for free to enable the next generation of creative technologists with the super-power of coding and hope you give it a try or share it with someone who might want to learn programming.
One option for artists who share their artwork on Galeryst is to have their artwork included on the Artwork Map page. I added this page to Galeryst because I have done most of my artwork en plein air in my journals when traveling and I thought that seeing it on a map would be interesting. Anyone can have their artwork shown in the Artwork map if they take the following steps:
The update to Galeryst is that we are changing the mapping service from Bing Maps to Azure Maps – as we got a notice that the Bing Maps service was being retired soon. Changing the service required some work and while doing that we improved the experience to load all the artwork locations much more efficiently.
One of the improvements was to handle artwork that are in the same location as shown below, picking the pin at Barcelona shows a list of artwork that I created there – one of the most inspiring places in the world to create artwork. Selecting one of the artworks, opens a small card with an image of the artwork. Clicking on the artwork will then take the visitor to the gallery and artwork in it. It is a fun way to discover galleries. Give this new map a try and please share any feedback. We have tested it on computers, tablets, and phones!
We encourage you to add locations to you artwork and enable maps in Galeryst so people can find all the inspiring locations around the world to create artwork!
| On Galeryst, it has been so inspiring to see the range of artists who have chosen the platform to share their artwork. We have seen many students and young people use it. One talented artist is Xuanfei, a New York-based high school student who uses Galeryst to showcase her multimedia artworks and the photography of her elderly relatives. In her own words, “I like to use multiple mediums to create art from sparks of creativity that come to mind, allowing myself to also indirectly address enduring issues through brushstrokes.” |
As she describes this piece in her gallery Vivid Vistas:
“At first glance, this artwork seems simple like the capture of a moment in time. But the bigger picture behind this work is that not everything in the world has changed to fit industrialization as the efforts to preserve nature still exists but in smaller parts of today’s world. To me, the view of a mountain is a safe space of astonishing natural beauty with its dense, evergreen forests, lucid and sparkling streams, and rugged peaks. In 2024, I visited “The Pink Mountain” online, which inspired me to create this artwork from my imagination and creativity using sand to evoke texture. This is a piece of sand art on canvas that I created in 2024, one of my favorites, as it depicts a stream unpolluted and grimy but healthy due to the presence of algae, diverse and colorful flowers, and pink peaks that got their hue from the sunset above and the mineral composition of its mountain. Mountains allow for an ecosystem of wild animals to thrive and give off a sense of spiritual realm, Mother-nature, confidence, determination, and the embodiment of life.”
Galeryst sits at an interesting intersection of creativity and technology, allowing anyone to create a virtual 3D gallery to share their artwork and it is enabled by code, the “paintbrush” of software. As the creator of Galeryst, I have always been interested in that intersection as a creative medium. Over the past year a new creative platform has emerged that I have gotten very excited about, Adobe Express. Adobe Express is an easy to use web-based design tool that will help you create anything from a flyer, an Instagram post, a website, to a video to upload to YouTube. What excites me about it is that it is extensible in a number of ways: you can embed the editing tools in your own website and you can create powerful add-ons that run inside Adobe Express and can be used to create and manipulate graphics. I have used this platform to create Galeryst, a free add-on for Adobe Express that enables you to use the artwork in your gallery in an Adobe Express design as well as create galleries from your Adobe Express artwork. Since releasing this add-on earlier this year, it has brought many people to Galeryst.com to create galleries which is super exciting for me because I get inspired by seeing the artwork that people showcase in their galleries.
In building the add-on, I started seeing how powerful the Adobe Express platform was and had an idea – what if I could make it easy for people of all ages to learn coding by creating graphics in Adobe Express? I started experimenting and came up with a plan to use Google’s Blockly toolkit to create an Adobe Express add-on that turns the Adobe Express JavaScript Document Sandbox API into blocks that anyone can connect together to make code that runs in Adobe Express. With that plan, I got a small grant from the Adobe Fund for Design that enabled me to design, build, and release Creative Coding. If you hadn’t heard the term Creative Coding before, it is a type of computer programming that focuses on creating something expressive rather than functional. Creative Coding is free for anyone using Adobe Express (which is also free) and runs in a browser on Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac devices.
If I look back at what got me started with computers when I was a kid, it was creating graphics on the screen of a Tandy TRS-80 computer by learning and typing in BASIC code in school. I built Creative Coding and released it for free to enable the next generation of creative technologists with the super-power of coding with graphics.
Creating a code script in Creative Coding is easy – drag blocks from the library on the left to the workspace and connect them together.
This action will then create the following code which you see to the right of the workspace that can then be executed to create a rectangle on the current page in Adobe Express.
if (phase == "ui") {
ui.setExecuteLabel("Run script");
resolve();
return;
}
editor.context.insertionParent.children.append((()=>{
const node = editor.createRectangle();
node.width = 200;
node.height = 100;
return node;
})());
In addition to the standard Adobe Express elements like line, rectangle, ellipse, path, group, image, and text, you can also use variables, loops, functionals, and create UI for the user.
I have also added blocks to enable you to get images from galleries hosted on Galeryst.
Within Creative Coding there is an online help, a series of progress steps and even a certificate printed at the completion of the progress steps so it can be used as part of in-class or home-study programs. If you are an educator, please give it a try and reach out if you have any ideas, feedback, or are interested in using it in your class or school.
Since launching, the way to create a gallery on Galeryst has been to use an album on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Lightroom has great photo management capabilities, works great across devices, and has a robust API that Galeryst uses. I have been using it to organize my 30 years of artwork. Today we are excited to announce another option for gallerists to use to generate galleries: direct image uploads from your computer, phone, or tablet. This enables any person across the globe to create their free gallery on Galeryst without a Lightroom subscription! Subscribers can continue to use both Lightroom and file uploads to create as many galleries as their plan allows.
When you click the Create a free gallery button on the home page or the Create a gallery button on the My Galleries page you will see a new option to create a new gallery from image files.
This will open a new user experience to let you upload artworks, order them, add details to artworks, and create a gallery. This will create a gallery with the default parameters that will create a great looking gallery in seconds. You can do this from your phone, tablet, or computer.
Once the gallery has been generated, you will likely want to then customize it as well to change the materials, add cards, maps, and other properties, but you can also manage your uploaded assets as well:
In the updated Assets tab you can easily do a variety of things:
Once done with your customizations, press the Update gallery button to regenerate your gallery with the updated information.
We expect that this new functionality will make it much easier for anyone from almost any device create beautiful galleries from their images and we are so excited for this next phase of Galeryst!
By far, the topic that in tech that is getting the most attention and gathering the most excitement is artificial intelligence (AI) and in AI the field that is sparking the most creative interest in Generative AI (GenAI). We have been thinking of how to apply GenAI to Galeryst for a while now and have come up with a couple of features that we are releasing today: Generative Materials and Generative Galleries.
Using the Azure OpenAI Dall-E foundational model, artists can now create material textures for their gallery floor, walls, panels, and ceilings. A new materials tab will now show up when customizing a gallery where artists can use prompts to create material textures that can then be used in foyers and wings. The textures will be unique for the artist and can be used across all of their galleries.
Now, when updated the gallery looks like this with the Mexican tile put on the floor:
We encourage all artists to give this a try and forge some great new materials to enhance your galleries.
Taking the generative concept a bit further, we now have an experimental feature to generate entire galleries from a journey and a few parameters using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E. This concept is based on how I have been keeping a visual journal of my travels throughout the years where, you specify a year, an artistic style and some locations, and a journey and corresponding gallery is generated with artwork from those locations. Please give this a try and join in the discussion about it. This is just the starting point. Take a look at a gallery generated of Copenhagen, Aarhus, Stockholm, and Helsinki in red pencil. As an artist who has been to all of these places and sketched them, it makes me smile. Give it a try and start a discussion here – I’m sure there are lots of opinion on AI-generated artwork and lots of room for improvement at making this experiment even better.
So much is happening every day with generative AI that it is hard to keep up but at Galeryst, we want to use it to enhance the gallery experience across many axes, from discovery to creation to visiting. We are working on even more functionality to enhance the gallery experience with AI: stay tuned! Generative AI is the transformational technology of the day, and it is important for all of us to understand its power, how to use it, and where it should (and shouldn’t) be used. All creative people need to understand how it will impact their world as the new saying goes, “your job will not be replaced by AI but by someone who knows how to use AI better than you.”
We have just added new functionality to Galeryst to enable artists to create narrated walk-through tours of their galleries. Here is a walk-through of the feature. To create a tour, an artist opens their gallery and the tour authoring pane and then picks tour stop locations in their gallery. The time between locations and the duration at each location can be easily configured. You can drag and drop the tour stops in the vertical timeline to reorder them.
Once tour stop locations are set, add an audio file to synchronize with the tour which is an animated flow from stop to stop. Galeryst subscribers can upload the audio file so that visitors can hear the audio playback when they visit the gallery. You can use any screen recording tool to record a video of the tour, or you can embed the tour as an iframe in another website. An interactive tour guide is automatically generated and can be used to easily move between artworks in the tour by clicking on the stops in the guide.
All public tours will be shown on the Gallery Tours page so visitors can easily find your tour.
If your gallery has a public tour, visitors can start it from the Tours button on the gallery toolbar.
We are excited to see the tours that our artists create, and we look forward to featuring the first ones created!
Galeryst now has the ability for anyone with a gallery on the site to create printable products that can be sold to visitors in the Galeryst Shop. Partnering with Printify, Galeryst enables you to easily create a variety of made-to-order drop-shipped products. Currently 86 products ranging from framed posters to giclée art prints to greeting cards are all available to make products from your artwork. You can create products for some of the artworks in your gallery or all of them. You can also determine what kind of profit margin that you want to earn when visitors buy your products and your products will have their own section in the Galeryst Shop.
Start on the Create Products page where you pick the gallery, artworks, products, listing details, and profit margins. You can see the details for each of the products. You will also need to configure a payout account so we can share profits with you. Galeryst partners with Stripe to enable the payout accounts in all locations supported by Stripe. Like a physical gallery, Galeryst splits the revenue with the artists, with a percentage determined by the artist’s subscription plan.
Once you create the products, they will appear in the Galeryst shop in your category section. You can also see the products on the Galeryst Products page.
Once visitors start ordering, you can track their orders on the Orders page. You can update or remove your products at any time and the Galeryst team will share revenue with artists on a monthly basis.
Once you have created products, they will start appearing in your galleries. On your gallery page, a new Products section will display below the foyer gallery image.
Clicking on the product image in the Piece column navigates the visitor to the artwork in the gallery with a card to the right of it for each of the products available for it. clicking on the card takes the visitor directly to the product page to buy it.
Clicking on the product link takes a visitor directly to the product page where they can buy the product.
The biggest change to Galeryst to enable products is the new navigation menu with the Shop category. You will find other changes across the site to support products and the ability for artists to easily earn revenue from their artwork from a global audience.
We are excited to see what products you create on Galeryst. We started Galeryst with a simple mission to enable any artist to create a beautiful gallery to share their art with the world. Let’s see what you can do with it!