Profile

This page covers the various features and aspects of your personal profile. Your profile is the hub of your personal expression on Folio. It contains your biography, artistic statement, goals, journal and portfolio - everything that is unique to you.

There are four main components (views) of your profile: About, Goals, Journal and Portfolio.

About

Here you’re either viewing your own, or another artist/mentor’s profile. Just like you, they’re able to make themselves open to collaboration. If they are, feel free to message them about the idea you had in mind.

If you’re looking at your own profile, this is how you’ll appear to other artists/mentors using FOLIO. If you’d like to change your personal information, artist statement, or include any additional links (i.e. to social media, a website), you can do so using the edit function.

Personal Info

This section is for your short Bio and is where you could offer your contact information. Be concise, clear, and creative. What to include: name, perhaps where you grew up, how you identify, where you currently live/work etc particularly if this relates to your artwork. Basic information about your work ie: preferred mediums, scale of your work, where you might have shown it in the past.

Artistic Statement

While an artist statement can be about a single work of art, a body of work, here, describe you as an artist and why or how you make your artistic decisions. An artist statement of high quality will introduce the viewer – in as few words as possible – to the thought processes, themes or cultural context the work was created in. This is an opportunity to clarify artistic choices, such as colors, shapes, textures, methods you have used, themes, politics and discuss why they are important. How they relate to the techniques you employ in your art practice.

Here you can describe what you would like to accomplish with your art and name anything or anyone that has inspired or influenced your work.

Goals

(in development)

Journal

This is an archive of all of your own journal entries to date. Don’t worry, not all of these will be visible to other users- you can decide which ones to make public when you edit each entry specifically. Journal entries are a great way to reflect on your artistic process and record your progress. When you make a new entry you’ll be able to do all sorts of things:

• Set new goals or reflect on old ones
• Track various skills
• Address some of the challenges you’ve faced in your work

You can also search for specific entries, using various keywords or tags. As you can see, the more tags you add, the easier it will be for you to find and organize your entries later.

Viewing a journal entry

Select a entry to view it. This shows a specific journal entry you’ve made. Here you have the ability to edit the entry, add more to it, or delete it.

Feeling like this entry is no longer relevant? Instead of editing it or deleting it entirely, consider keeping it and making a new entry instead. Progress can be difficult to identify, but keeping your journal entries for later can make the reflection process a lot easier.

Editing a journal entry

Here is where you can craft new journal entries. These entries can be kept private, for your own reflection, or you can decide to share them with peers or mentors.

You can also attach any additional files or photos that you feel like will support you in your journaling process. For example you may decide to include an image of a piece you’re currently working on, or a photograph you’ve taken throughout the day that you’d like to reflect on.

On the bottom of the page you can add skill tags which will make your entry easier to search for later on. Whether it’s the title or genre of the piece, feelings you talked about, materials you used, themes you discussed, etc. These tags help to categorize your entry, and group like journals together.

Journal entry sections

These are the sections which every journal entry has.

Current Art Piece / Project

Describe what you are working on and what you want to do next. Whether this is a small piece or a larger project. Who is involved? Where it is taking place? This is a macro-scale description of what you are thinking about producing.

Progress to Date

Where are you in the process of creating this project? Are there dates or milestones that are significant that you want to pay attention to?

Challenges

What are you having trouble with? Is there anything from keeping you from doing the work? How do you see overcoming these challenges? Maybe you need some help?

Goals

What do you want to accomplish with this work? Who do you want the art piece to speak to? If you want to showcase your work, where do you want to show it? Do you want it to lead to more work?

Inspirations

Who and/or what inspired this work? Who do you want to inspire?

Reflections, Experience, Feelings...

Why is this work important to you? What are you thinking about during the creation of this work? Are you noticing any particular thoughts or feelings that emerge?

For Future...

What have you learned so far through creating this work? Or about this work? Are there any realizations that you want to remember moving forward with other projects?

Portfolio

This is an archive of all your portfolios to date.

Viewing a portfolio

Your portfolio is a great place to share pieces that best reflect your work as an artist. Your portfolio is public, so once you post it you can’t not share it with just specific people. However you’ll still be able to delete and edit it later.

Here you can integrate other work you’ve shared with FOLIO.