A guide for makers and writers

Your page

1. Come in with your invitation. Open the link in your invitation email, or type its code at the door. Each code makes one profile.
2. Choose a name and a handle. Your name is how people see you (up to 40 characters). Your handle is your address, artionic.com/@yourhandle: 3 to 20 small letters, numbers or underscores. It cannot be changed later.
3. Keep your key. Instead of a password, you are shown a key of twenty letters and numbers, once. Save it in your password manager. If you add an email address in your studio, we can send you a new key if you ever lose it.
4. Fill in your studio. Open Your studio and choose Make art or Both; the part for hanging work opens only then. Add where you are, up to six crafts, a few lines about yourself (400 characters) and one link.
5. Choose the work you stand beside. One work from the opening hang. Your page takes its wall colour from it.

Photographing your work

The picture is the work, for everyone who has not stood in front of it. A phone is enough. Light and patience are what matter.

• Daylight, out of the sun. Near a big window on a bright, overcast day, or in open shade. No flash, and turn off the room lights so their colour does not mix in.
• Square on. Hang or prop the work upright and stand straight in front of its centre, with the phone parallel to it. Step back and zoom in a little rather than standing close; it keeps the edges straight.
• No glare. With varnish or glass, move until the reflection leaves the surface. Shooting a few degrees off one side, with the light from the other, usually does it. Take the work out of its glazed frame if you can.
• Crop to the edges. Show the work and nothing else: no wall, no easel, no fingers. If the frame belongs to the work, include it on every picture of it.
• True colour. Turn off filters and “vivid” modes. Compare the photograph with the work, side by side, before you send it.
• Things with sides. Pots, sculpture, weaving and jewellery: a plain background, a three-quarter view as the main picture, and the other sides and a close detail as process pictures.

Hanging a work

In your studio, under Hang a work, choose the picture of the finished piece. It appears straight away on a wall mixed from its own colours, as others will see it. Then fill in its record:

Title

up to 90 characters

Year

up to 20, such as “2026” or “2019–2025”

Size

up to 40, height × width (× depth), with the unit: “60 × 80 cm” or “24 × 30 in”

Medium

up to 80, the materials: “Oil on linen”, “Stoneware, ash glaze”

The story of its making

up to 1,200 characters

How it was made

up to six pictures, each with a line of up to 200 characters

Write the size exactly. It is the first thing a collector asks, and the record is where a buyer will check it. The story need not be long; what went wrong, and what you would tell another maker, is what people read.

A studio holds sixty works. You can take one down at any time, and its pictures are deleted with it. Hang only work you made by hand and have the right to show; the house rules say more.

Writing

Anyone with a profile can put up a poem or an essay from Write something. It appears in Writing, on your page, and in the day of everyone who follows you.

• Plain text, kept as typed. A blank line starts a new stanza or paragraph. In a poem, line breaks and indents are kept exactly; the Tab key indents (press Escape first to leave the box with Tab).
• Lengths. A title of up to 120 characters. A poem of up to 8,000 characters, an essay of up to 40,000 (about six thousand words).
• Drafts. While you write, an unsent draft is kept in this browser only, so a closed tab does not lose it.
• After. You can change a piece or take it down at any time. Readers answer it in the room beneath it, and can quote a line.
• Yours. Post only what you wrote. You keep the rights to it.