What information we need
The Web page that will highlight your show will contain a biographical sketch of your involvement in art, and will include samples of your work. We'd like to have about a page of bio and two or three digital images. For examples, see what we've got on the current show and the next month's show.
If you have a web site for your art, send us the URL and we will link to your site.
When we need it
We ask you to provide your information two months in advance of the start of your show. For example, if your show is scheduled for April, we'd like your information by the first of February. The web page highlighting your show will be posted on the Web one full month in advance of the show, and we need time to prepare it. Also, if we have any problems with your files (see below), we will need to coordinate with you to resolve them.
Where to send it
Send your information to the Fine Arts Committee Representative who contacted you after your work is juried. You can save that person some work by also sending it to the Committee's webmistress, Elizabeth Buie.
Biography files
We'd like your biographic information in Microsoft Word format, Microsoft's Rich Text Format (RTF), or plain text. HTML is acceptable only if it's "clean." (If you don't know whether or not the HTML is clean, you are welcome to send it anyhow; we'll let you know if we can use it or if we need your bio in another format.) We will edit your material as necessary to ensure that it is clear and that it uses correct grammar, syntax, and spelling.
The bio you use at your reception does not have to be the same as the one you send us for use on the web site. For the web site, the bio should refer to you in the third person, and should start with your name (e.g., "Elizabeth Buie received her first camera at age 12..."). We prefer that you use your first name throughout the rest of the bio, but in any case all bios of artists in a group show should use the same convention.
The bio should be about you and your art in general. Do not describe the specific samples of your art that are on the page; they are there to illustrate your style and to entice web site visitors to come see the show.
Digital image files
The Fine Arts Committee is putting your information on our Web site to encourage RRUUC members and friends, as well as members of the greater Washington community, to come to RRUUC and see your work — and especially to attend your reception. All images you send us for our Web site must be of work that will appear in your show at RRUUC.
In preparing digital images to represent your work, you will need to consider two factors: the quality of the photography, and the quality of the digital images. These are not the same thing.
The following two sections explain what we need.
Photographic quality
We strongly recommend that you enlist — or hire — someone who is familiar with photographing artwork and who knows how to light it to its best advantage and to avoid reflections. The photograph should not include any part of the frame or the wall, and the artwork should not be obscured by anything in the environment. Snapshots require too much work on our part to make them usable, and even then there's only so much we can do.
We recommend that you do not use a single on-camera flash. It's likely to create bright spots or even shining highlights in the center of the image, and the edges are likely to be noticeably darker than the center.
Image quality
We accept image files in TIFF or JPEG format; and we prefer that JPEG images be of medium quality or higher (30 or above in Adobe Photoshop's "Save for Web" dialog). The image should be approximately 400 pixels in the smallest dimension. (We will reduce it to meet our needs. We prefer to start with something bigger than what we need, to help ensure that the end product is of acceptable quality; but we do not need images that will fill a computer screen. If a JPEG file is more than about 500K in size, it is too large.)
It would make our job a little easier if you could embed the sRGB color profile into your images; but if you don't know what that means or don't have a way to do it, don't worry about it.
Please use file names that indicate in some way the title of the image, and do not include spaces, slashes, colons, commas, or capital letters in the file names. It's also a good idea to separate words with underscores. For example, if I were going to use my image called "Courtyard View," I would give it a file name of buie_courtyard_view.jpeg.
The images we use on this web site must be of works that will hang at RRUUC.
Questions about art shows? See our guidelines for artists or contact Fine Arts Committee co-chair Don Martell or Evelyn Jacob.