The Journal Feature Challenge

I love featuring art in my journal on a regular basis. There is so much great art around here that I find fascinating and I wish more people could see it. It's a great way to discover new artists and find inspiration. You can always browse and search for art on your own, but in my experience, is a lot more effective to search through collections curated by artists with interests similar to yours, as in their favourites or features in their journals. Besides, is also a great way to show your appreciation for artists you admire! And usually artists do appreciate the promotion when you let them know.

Size matters

Thumbnails nowadays can be used by both premium and non premium members in journals. The code for these is always easily accesible on every deviation page, at the right, just above the deviation' statistics. It looks like this: :thumb#######:
Also, today thanks to Sta.sh you can easily add these thumbnails to your journals and resize them freely, but also a very quick and easy way to make bigger versions of these thumbnails is by just adding "big" at the beginning, like this: :bigthumb#######:

Regular thumbnail: :thumb379378963: Big thumbnail: :bigthumb379378963:

Be creative!

You don't need a fancy CSS to promote art.  Just try to arrange your thumbs in a creative way, don't just dump them there! Combine both regular and big thumbnails and/or try using images in various sizes using sta.sh. You can also organize the thumbs according to their shape (landscape, portrait or square), organize them by colors, alternate their alignment to the right, left or center,etc.

Keep it simple!

You might think making a big feature with 100 thumbnails might be a good idea, but usually when people see just a big wall of images, they won't pay much attention to the whole thing, even less to each work individually. You can make your feature more effective by showing a moderate quantity of art each time. Remember that quality is better than quantity!

To write or not to write...

You can  add descriptions to your features and explain why you think their art is awesome, that's a good idea. Just as a tip: keep it short and concise, remember that in a journal feature, the main focus should be the art, don't write an essay Or you can also let the art speak for itself, that's also valid!

Do it regularly!

Your features might gain more impact if you do it regularly, in the form of a series. Random one shots are nice, but if you do it regularly, more people will have a reason to keep an eye on your journal because they'll have something to expect. You can focus on a particular theme, subject or medium, for example, if you like comics, try featuring comic art on a regular basis!

Let the artist know you featured them

People usually appreciate when you do this, let's be honest, who doesn't like to get their art promoted? Just leave them a quick note or comment letting them know you featured them in your journal.

The journal entry must be from now and until next Sunday, June 30th. You have all week! The journal must contain a minimum of 5 features and a maximum of 15. (remember: keep it simple!) You must promote the art of others only, promoting your own art in this occasion won't count (there will be challenges for self-promotion later ) The use of CSS is not mandatory, (in fact as you'll read down below, the challenge is encouraged for non premium members) just try to arrange your thumbnails and/or images in a creative way, try following some of the tips described above! All art forms are elegible to get featured, in fact, why don't you try featuring art you don't usually look at? Keep an open mind and try to broaden your taste! Submit your journal to the category Journal Portal > Culture > Art Features. When done, share the link to your entry in a comment down below.

The purpose of this challenge is to foster the journal feature culture and encourage the community to promote others as an act of kindness. However, as an incentive, some random Points and even Premium Memberships will be given to participants. If your feature catches my attention for its originality, you might receive some points! If you're a non premium member but are creative to showcase other's art in your journal, I might give you a PM so you can continue doing it now with CSS!
Additionally, ALL participants will get featured in my journal at the end of the challenge.