Are you a Chico Area Artist interested in a virtual gallery or are you applying to the Chico ART Festival and would like to be featured?

Here are the steps:

1. Become a ChiVAA member HERE or apply to the Chico ART Festival HERE.

2. Email the following to webmaster@chivaa.org with “Chico Artist-Your Name” as the subject line:

• Art Category – Your main medium.
• Artist Story – A few sentences about your art and yourself as an artist, or a story about the art you are showing.
• 3-12 Images – jpegs around 900-1000 pixels wide (max 1 MB per jpeg) saved with artist name_title.jpg as in “JohnSmith_ChicoSunset.jpg”.
• Title, Medium, Size, Price, plus a sentence if desired for each image.
• Artist Photo
• Contact Info – Links and handles to websites and social media.

Think of your post as your virtual gallery, or a way to introduce yourself and your work to the public at large.

• Send all the written info simply typed into the email. Do not send separate PDF or Word documents.
• Attach jpegs to the email. If you cannot attach all the images in one email, send a second email with the same subject line.

Once the post is published and listed in the Chico Area Artists directory, we will email you a link and post it on Facebook. As a reciprocal courtesy, share the webpage/post and the Facebook entry with your collectors and friends on social media and your website.

More suggestions on how to prepare your information for publishing

Image Preparation
To edit, crop, resize and rename your images, use a free online photo editors like Pxlr, Adobe Photoshop Express or an app on your phone like Snapseed. Do an online search or check this website with reviews of free online photo editors. For resizing go to ResizeImage.net, upload your photo, crop it, rotate it if needed, size it to 1000 pix as the longest size, select [jpg], optimize to normal compression at 80%, and click [Resize Image]. Download Image. Rename the downloaded image in the finder before attaching it to the email.

Some email programs and apps, let you change the image size when attaching jpegs to your email, saving you having to resize the image. Check if you have this option in your email configuration. If you are using an Apple email app, choose [Large] for [Image Size] before sending the email, and it will automatically resize your jpegs to a good size for the web.

Artist Story – Why is it important?
Viewer of your post want to feel connected to you and your art. Images by themselves are great, but a story accompanying the art is better. In addition, the internet search engines, the robots do not read images, they need text to index your webpage. Having your artist name repeated a few times will help with web search optimization.

Image for Facebook
Each post has a featured image that will appear when the page is posted as a link on Facebook. The preferred size for year 2020 for this jpeg is 1200 pixels wide by 630 pixels high. If the image chosen for your page as the featured image is that exact size, it will normally not be cropped when the preview appears on the Facebook post. If you include an image for Facebook, add a note. Otherwise we will choose a landscape image at random.