Introducing the Art Hive Studio

Sep 30, 2023 | About 2 min reading time

I recently applied to be an early adopter for a new web host called Marigold Town, where the premise is that each website is a part of an overarching town and will have its own "storefront" on the homepage of that town. The website itself can be pretty much anything within this theme, and you're encouraged to get creative with it. You can read more about it on the website if you'd like.

As many others did, I immediately thought of an art gallery. Apparently there are a handful of us doing that already, so I adjusted my idea to be an art studio as well in the end. The Art Hive Studio is a space for supporting artists, both through providing resources on a variety of topics (learning art, pricing and taking commissions, etc.) and through "exhibitions" featuring various artists, which will take place every two months. The submission period for the first one will actually open on October 1st of 2023, and will last for the first 10 days of the month!

One neat feature I've come up with for the "exhibitions" is actually storing each "exhibit" in an array, and then using the shuffle function in PHP to randomize the order of that array. This means if there are a lot of artists featured, there won't be any issues with artists further down the list not getting seen. Or at least, that's the idea.

Another feature is that when the submission period is open, the text displayed on the submission page will change automatically to display the instructions for submitting art, and it will change automatically again when the submission period is done. There won't be any issues with me forgetting to update the page!

Anyways, I just wanted to share that here in case anyone was interested, because I'm pretty proud of how it's set up so far. I'd also love to hear ideas on resources I should add (it's a pretty small list right now), and if you have ideas for other ways the site can support artists besides exhibitions and resources, I'd love to hear that too! My contact information is listed on the Art Hive site's contact page.