Somebody who paints or draws for a living doesn't need much from a website. A clean way to show the work, a little about who's behind it, and a way to get in touch if someone wants to buy a piece or ask about a commission. That's the whole job. Cantrip gets you there fast. The one decision worth slowing down for is which gallery section to use, since the two options don't work the same way, and picking wrong flattens your art before anyone gets a good look at it.
Cantrip has two sections built for this. Photo Gallery lays images out in a clean, uniform grid, two to ten columns, same-size squares all the way down. Showcase lays out cards instead: an image, a title, a description box, and an optional link, in whatever shape the photo actually is.
Here's the catch with each. Photo Gallery crops every image into a square. Fine if you're a photographer already shooting in square format. Rough if you paint, since a tall portrait or a wide landscape gets cut down to fit a box that was never the piece's real shape. You're not showing the painting anymore. You're showing part of it.
Showcase keeps a piece's actual proportions and gives you room to write something about it: the medium, the size, whatever else matters. That's usually the better fit for real artwork. But there's a second catch hiding in the same section: add a link to a piece (a shop page, a commission form, wherever) and the full-screen zoom view turns off for that item. Click it and visitors go straight to wherever you sent them instead of getting a closer look first. Skip the link and the zoom stays on, but so does the dead end of a piece nobody can act on.
Neither is wrong. It's a real tradeoff, not a bug: decide per piece whether a closer look matters more than a next step. A painting that's not for sale yet, skip the link and let people zoom in. A print that is for sale, link it and accept the zoom's gone for that one.
Past the gallery, keep the rest simple. A short bio does more work than people expect: who you are and what you actually make. Skip the resume format, save that for a CV nobody asked for here. A plain contact form beats posting your email straight on the page. It cuts down on spam and still gets you the message. If you've got collectors willing to say something nice, Cantrip's testimonials pull from a small collection you set up once, with a star rating or a photo next to the quote if you want it: real proof instead of another paragraph of your own claims.
One thing worth resisting: the urge to put every piece you've ever made online. A tight set of your best work, ten or twenty pieces, does more for you than fifty. Nobody's grading you on volume. They're deciding in about four seconds whether to keep scrolling.