I am excited to announce a new workshop that I will be leading at Mystic Mill Valley in August to teach you how to create 3D interactive sketched stories with Mental Canvas.
As most of my artwork has been in journals, I have always looked for ways to make my artwork come alive digitally. This is a really fun tool for Apple iPads and Windows tablets that I want to share with anyone who wants to tell a story with their pictures. Sign up today for the workshop on August 20, 2026!
For more than thirty years, I’ve carried journals with me wherever I travel. Because journals never exhibit well in real art galleries, I created Galeryst to exhibit my journals after scanning in over 1,000 pages during the pandemic. I try to bring a journal wherever I go – it is a part of me.
Some are filled with quick sketches made while waiting for trains. Others contain watercolor paintings, photographs, ticket stubs, maps, notes, and observations collected along the way. Together they form a visual record of places I’ve visited, people I’ve met, and moments I might otherwise have forgotten.
Unlike photographs stored on a phone, an illustrated travel journal requires us to slow down.
When we sketch a building, paint a landscape, or write about an experience, we engage with the world differently. We notice details. We pay attention to light, texture, color, and atmosphere. We become participants rather than spectators.
Over the years, my journals have become some of my most treasured possessions. They are not simply records of trips; they are creative artifacts that capture what it felt like to be there.
One of my favorite approaches is combining multiple forms of storytelling on a single page. A sketch can sit beside a map fragment. A watercolor painting can share space with a photograph, a train ticket, or handwritten notes. The result is a layered visual narrative that tells a richer story than any single medium could tell on its own.
Many artists already keep sketchbooks. An illustrated travel journal takes that practice a step further by incorporating memory, place, and personal experience into the creative process.
That is the focus of my upcoming workshop, The Illustrated Travel Journal, which I will be teaching at La Romita School of Art in Umbria, Italy from April 2–12, 2027.
Over ten days, participants will explore historic towns, landscapes, and cultural sites throughout Umbria while learning techniques for:
The workshop combines field excursions with studio instruction and is designed for artists who want to expand their creative toolbox while creating a meaningful record of their travels.
Whether your goal is to improve your sketching skills, become more confident with watercolor, or simply discover a new way of experiencing the world, illustrated journaling offers a powerful creative practice that continues long after the trip is over.
If you’ve ever looked through an old journal and been transported back to a moment you thought you’d forgotten, you already understand its value.
The pages become more than paper.
They become a place you can return to.
The Illustrated Travel Journal
April 2–12, 2027
La Romita School of Art, Umbria, Italy
Early registration is now open:
https://laromita.org/program/michael-scherotter-the-illustrated-travel-journal/
Do you know someone who is interested in getting some marketing experience at the intersection of art and technology to start building their resume? If so, point them at a new marketing internship role at Galeryst.
This work is idea for an upper-level high school student, current college student or recent graduate with good writing skills who wants to use some of their free time to start building a resume that demonstrates their impact, initiative, and ingenuity.
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!