Creating An Art Inventory
Portrait of Amie Digital Painting
Last week I began work on creating a comprehensive inventory of my art. My first pass is to create my inventory in a spreadsheet format using OpenOffice Calc. Subsequently I expect to migrate to a database format using MySQL.
Previously my art inventory system was quite informal and inconsistent. The only formal inventory I had was of those limited edition prints that had been either exhibited or sold. That inventory, maintained in spreadsheet format, was necessary in order to provide each print a unique inventory number for use with the Certificate of Authenticity that accompanies each of my original prints.
Separately my only other inventory consisted of the information associated with the web pages for the art that is on my web site. As of this writing there are a total of 58 of my works of art exhibited on my web site.
My initial pass at an inventory wound up with 107 items being cataloged – which does represent a substantial portion of my formal output. By formal, I mean art that is destined to be framed, exhibited, sold. Excluded from this process is:
- the net art I've created to illustrate my web site and blog posts (see the Web Art Gallery for some examples of this art);
- wallpapers I've created for sharing (see Free IPAD Algorithmic Art Wallpaper Gallery);
- art I created as a part of experimenting with different styles of digital painting.
This inventory made it very obvious that I have much work to do in getting my art into my web art gallery since just 58 of the 107 artworks, 54 percent, are currently exhibited on my web site. And of course my inventory is not yet complete.
The initial fields of my art inventory spreadsheet are:
- Painting Title
- Artwork title
- Gallery Directory
- Directory name on hard drive of the gallery directory.
- Artwork Directory
- Directory name on hard drive of artwork directory inside gallery directory.
- URL
- Address of the gallery page – empty for art not on web site.
- Date Created
- Date artwork created.
- Subcategory
- Photographic, Digital Painting, 3D Render, etc.
- Paper Type
- Paper type to be used for original limited edition prints.
- Edition Size
- Maximum umber of original prints to be produced.
- PPI
- Pixels per inch setting for printing
- Pixels Wide
- Image width in pixels
- Pixels High
- Image height in pixels
- Inches wide
- (calculated PPI * Pixels Wide)
- Inches high
- (calculated PPI * Pixels High)
- Matted Size
- Used to determine frame size needed.
- Square Inches
- Size of art in square inches (calculated inches wide * high)
- Price
- Print Price
- Price/in2
- (calculated Price/Square Inches)
- Notes
- Comments as needed
Once complete, my goal is to convert the two spreadsheets – the main inventory spreadsheet and my Certificate of Authenticity spreadsheet – into two tables in a relational database so that I will be able to cross reference the two.
The Illustration
The digital painting used to illustrate this post is a very tightly cropped version of a larger painting created as a test of a digital painting program that I have been working on. Titled Portrait of Amie it is based on a photo of a friend.
Closing Quote
Composition is the artist's method of organising a subject, of deciding what to put in and what to leave out in order to make an effective picture. – Mary Acton
| Return to the Blog Index | This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Art and Artists.