Art portfolios

Art portfolio website examples,
and what makes them work.

An art portfolio website has a harder job than a design portfolio. A designer can explain a project; a painting has to survive being two thousand pixels wide on someone else's screen. Most of what separates an art site that gets enquiries from one that does not happens before any of it is visible: which pieces went in, what order they sit in, and what the captions say.

So rather than show forty screenshots, below are the four designs a Bunfolio site can use, each shown as a full page, with a note on the practice it suits and — more usefully — where it works against you. After that is the part that matters more than the design: choosing, sequencing and captioning the work itself.

These are our own designs shown with sample content, not other artists' sites. Our showcase is opt-in, and we would rather say so than dress up a gallery we have not been given permission to publish.

Build your art portfolio freeSee the four designs

Four worked examples, and the practice each one suits

Halftone

Violet halftone hero, oversized uppercase type.

Suits: Illustrators, printmakers and graphic, high-contrast work

The work sits on a butter-yellow card rather than directly on the page, which does for a drawing what a mount board does in a frame: it gives the image an edge, so the eye reads it as a piece rather than as decoration. The halftone texture moves only once, on load, so nothing animates over the images.

Where it works against you: That yellow is a strong colour and will argue with work that is already warm — terracotta, ochre, a lot of skin tones. If your palette sits there, start with one of the quieter three.

More about the Halftone design

Noir

Pure black canvas, coral highlights.

Suits: Photography, ceramics, metalwork, glass and sculpture

Galleries hang this kind of work on dark walls for a reason: a black ground stops the surround competing with the object, and highlights on a glaze or a polished surface read properly against it. The accent colour appears only on links and titles.

Where it works against you: Dark grounds flatten dark work. Charcoal, ink, etching, oil in a low key — anything whose darkest value sits near the background — loses its edges here.

More about the Noir design

Spotlight

Colour-shifting panels, condensed display type.

Suits: Art directors, collectives and practices spanning several media

The background shifts as you scroll, from pale sage through lilac to lime, which gives each section its own room. If your practice covers three things that do not obviously belong together, that separation does more work than any amount of explanatory text.

Where it works against you: It is the most animated of the four, and a shifting ground is the wrong surround for colour-sensitive work. A painter who needs a viewer to judge a hue accurately should not pick it — the wall changes colour behind the painting.

More about the Spotlight design

Warm

Soft off-white, warm orange details.

Suits: Research-led and conceptual practices, and artists who also write

Serif headings over a generous measure, set for reading rather than impact. Choose it when the statement and the exhibition history carry as much weight as the images.

Where it works against you: It is deliberately quiet. If your work is loud and graphic, this design undersells it: the off-white page and sparing orange give you no help with a first impression.

More about the Warm design

Looking for the ready-made files rather than the reasoning? The portfolio templates page covers all four in detail, and the full examples gallery is the general version of this page.

What an art portfolio needs that other portfolios do not

Most advice about portfolio websites is written for designers and developers, where the unit is a project with a problem, a process and an outcome. Art does not divide up that way. The unit is a piece, or a body of work, and the people looking are asking different questions: what is this, how big is it, what is it made of, is it available, and is there more like it.

Captions carrying medium, dimensions and year. A curator or collector reads these before your statement, and a page of untitled images reads as unfinished to anyone who buys or exhibits work.
Work grouped into series rather than poured into one flat grid. A grid says "here is everything". A series says "here is a line of enquiry", which is what a gallery is looking for.
Images at a size worth looking at. A thumbnail that crops a painting to a square is a crop you would never have made in the studio, and it is the version most visitors see.
An obvious way to ask about a piece. Not necessarily a price — an enquiry route. Most work sold from an artist's site starts with a question rather than a checkout.

Choosing the work: the case for showing less

The most common fault in an artist's site is not bad work, it is too much of it. Fifty pieces across six years reads as an archive, and an archive invites a visitor to find your weakest piece. Twelve that belong together read as a practice with a direction.

A useful test: for every piece, ask what it is doing that the piece next to it is not. If the answer is "it is also quite good", it is costing you. The work you took down does as much for the site as the work you left up, because it is what makes the rest look chosen.

If you show more than one body of work, resist interleaving them: two series shown separately are legible, while the same pieces shuffled together read as indecision.

Sequencing: what the first three pieces decide

Almost nobody scrolls an art site to the bottom on a first visit, so the first three pieces are, in practice, your portfolio. They should be the strongest work you have, and work you want more of — a site weighted towards commissions you found tedious is an efficient way to be offered more of them.

After that, order for contrast rather than chronology. Date order is how the work happened, not how it reads, and it tells a visitor your recent work is at the bottom. Put pieces next to each other that differ in scale, value or density.

Captions, and why they are the most-read text on the page

A caption is three facts and sometimes a fourth: title, medium, dimensions, year. "Untitled, oil on linen, 120 × 90 cm, 2026" tells a visitor more about your practice than a paragraph of adjectives, and it is the format every gallery and open call asks for anyway.

They also do work you cannot see. The text around an image is what a search engine has to go on, so a page of files named IMG_4471 captioned nothing is invisible to someone looking for a printmaker in their city.

Where a piece has a story worth two sentences — a commission, a residency, a technical problem you solved — put them under it rather than in the statement. People read captions; they often do not read statements.

The artist statement people actually read

The statement that works on a website is not the one written for a funding application. It is shorter, in the first person, and answers the question a visitor who likes the work actually has: what is going on here, and is there a person behind it I could talk to.

Three or four sentences is usually enough — what you make, what you make it with, what you are after, and what you are open to. The long version belongs in a document you attach to applications, not on the page where someone is deciding whether to email you.

Mistakes that quietly cost enquiries

None of these are design problems. All of them are more common than bad design.

No contact route on the page with the work on it. A contact page one click away is one click more than many visitors will spend.
Images so large the page stalls on a phone. Photographs of paintings are often several megabytes each straight off the camera, and a gallery of twenty is a page nobody waits for.
Work with no date. An undated portfolio reads as dormant, and the assumption about a site that might be five years old is that you may not be working.
No exhibition, residency or stockist history, even a short one. Two lines of context changes how the work is read, and leaving it off is modesty that costs you.

Questions artists ask

How many pieces should an art portfolio website show?

Ten to fifteen for a single body of work, and no more than about twenty-five in total. The reason is not attention spans — it is that every additional piece lowers the average, and visitors judge you on the average rather than your best.

What should a caption under a piece of artwork say?

Title, medium, dimensions and year, in that order: "Study for a Harbour, oil on board, 40 × 30 cm, 2026". Galleries and open calls ask for exactly these fields, so writing them once saves the work later.

Is a website still worth it if I already have an active Instagram?

They do different jobs. A feed is ordered by when you posted, so it cannot present a series as a series, and a post from last year is effectively gone. A site is one address you control, which can be sent to a gallery and found in search. Most artists use the feed to be seen and the site to be assessed.

Should I put prices on my art portfolio website?

Only if you sell editions or small work at a fixed price, where the number answers the question for you. For originals and commissions an enquiry route works better: scale, framing and shipping get settled in the conversation.

Which of the four designs suits painting best?

It depends on the key your work sits in rather than the medium. Light, high-key painting holds up on the off-white Warm page; graphic, high-contrast work suits Halftone. Avoid the black Noir page if your darkest values are near-black, since the edges disappear, and avoid Spotlight if a viewer needs to judge colour accurately.

Get started

The portfolio worth studying most
is your own.

Pick one of the four designs, put ten pieces in it with real captions, and you have the thing none of the platforms give you: one address you control, which can be sent to a gallery and found in search. It is free, and it stays free on your own subdomain.

Build your art portfolio free

Art portfolio website examples,and what makes them work.