As an artist, you know the feeling a striking visual can invoke in people. And while the artwork you create will no doubt convey your intended message, your website must also present your portfolio in the right light. By neglecting your website’s design, you may as well draw a curtain over your best work.
A theme to display your artwork must have the right balance of functionality and customization, enabling you to craft the best design to complement your art. However, finding the needle within the haystack can be nigh-on impossible if you don’t know where to look.
Fortunately, the hard work has been done for you – we’ve sorted through the vast pile of themes developed with the needs of artists in mind, bringing you 21 of the best on the market today.
1. Divi
If you’ve been around WordPress for more than five minutes, you’ve no doubt heard of Divi. This multipurpose theme has a stellar reputation, but given its wide scope, can it really be suitable for artists?
The answer is: yes! For a start, your inner designer will be unleashed once you explore the monolithic Divi Builder. This drag-and-drop page builder includes over 46 content elements for building your pages. However, if you’d like to get up and running as quickly as possible, there are also over 20 pre-built layouts to choose from.
Displaying your portfolio is also no problem. Divi includes a number of customizable templates for doing so. There are full-width gallery, grid, and carousel layouts (with boxed versions available), and your portfolio can be filterable as well. The layouts are basic, but look stunning, and can be tweaked to perfection with the in-built Divi Builder options.
There’s no doubt that Divi delivers. We’re pleased to say it can be the ideal choice for artists who need design flexibility and power, and we wholeheartedly recommend it for creating your website.
2. Kalium
As an artist, a standout website is paramount for capturing attention and offering a snapshot of your style. As such, a killer theme such as Kalium will arguably be the most important website choice you’ll make.
Although other themes offer modern functionality and features, Kalium feels as though it’s on the ‘bleeding edge’. Plus, it’s easily configurable to your needs. To get started quickly, you can install one of 13 pre-built demos, although you’re also able to create your own layout using the bundled WPBakery Page Builder plugin. As for design customization, you can choose from over 1,500 fonts courtesy of Google and FontSquirrel, and with a premium upgrade you can also add over 2,500 Typekit fonts.
Of course, that’s not all. Kalium includes a dedicated admin panel that enables you to customize design elements such as colors, headers and footers, blog and portfolio pages, your storefront, and much more besides. Finally, the theme has been translated into 16 languages, and is fully compatible with the WPML plugin.
Overall, Kalium has a number of elements that feel familiar to other themes. However, this theme has an air of quality that many others just can’t match. We can wholeheartedly recommend Kalium, and urge you to check it out pronto!
3. Stockholm
The Swedish are known for their preference for minimalism, so it’s no surprise that Stockholm is focused on that approach. When it comes to showcasing your work, therefore, it won’t get in the way.
There is an absolute wealth of demo templates to choose from with this theme, encompassing businesses, landing pages, e-commerce stores, and much more. The portfolio layouts come across as larger than life, mainly due to the bold fonts and high-contrast color schemes. Stockholm also bundles in the premium WPBakery Page Builder plugin, which lets you create a layout that matches your unique requirements.
In a nutshell, Stockholm offers a simple way to show off your artistry in an attractive yet minimal style. If you want your work to take center stage, you may want to check out this theme’s demo!
4. Humpton
Humpton is a creative theme that works well for artist websites.
As this theme has a unique design, it should help your artist website stand out from the crowd. The interesting layouts and uses of text will ensure your site makes a strong first impression on your visitors. As Humpton is a theme aimed at people creating portfolios, you get access to lots of different templates for displaying your creative output.
If you want to get more creative with the design of your site, you can use the supported Elementor page builder plugin to edit any of the templates or create your own from scratch. Humpton has good support for custom fonts, giving you an easy way to quickly change how your site looks. Switching between light and dark modes is another way that you can personalize your site with very little effort.
The Humpton sliders and carousels help you display your work in interesting ways.
5. Eldon
Eldon has an artistic design that’s ideal for portfolio websites.
Whether you, your gallery or an artist you’re creating a website for needs a stylish website to showcase their creative output, Eldon has a few demos that you might want to check out. The demos can all be switched to either light or dark mode, giving you a quick way to match the design of your site with your preferred style. Other more granular changes can also be made, of course.
The Eldon demos all have interesting designs and layouts. Some have navigation bars at the bottom of the screen, others use animations to great effect. Sliders are incorporated into the design of many of the demos, giving you a creative way to display images to your audience.
Eldon has some striking templates that will make your website stand out from the crowd.
6. Caster
Caster is a creative portfolio theme that’s aimed at artists.
If you have some visual work you’d like to show off online, then this stylish portfolio theme should be appealing. Caster has multiple demos to help you find the right design for your portfolio. The templates all come in light and dark versions so you can set the mood for your website from the outset.
Thanks to the large library of portfolio templates, you get a lot of options when it comes to deciding how your work is displayed. There are many different grid layouts, sliders, and other modes for displaying your artistic output. As Caster was built around the Elementor page builder plugin, you can easily add your own artistic touches to your website when creating it with this theme.
The one-click demo importer tool feature of Caster will help you get set up in no time at all.
7. Uncode
Artists can fall into a wide range of categories – graphic designers, painters, musicians, and filmographers, to name a few. In Uncode, you’ll find a theme designed to appeal to any type of creative – with flexible layout design, stylish visual elements, and extensive branding options.
Uncode’s design is based around an included version of the WPBakery Page Builder plugin, tailored to provide you with only the layout options you need, and six menu styles, including an off-canvas option to keep your menu from obstructing your content. With the included LayerSlider and Revolution Slider plugins, you can display your best work prominently, and images can be showcased within a customizable lightbox, courtesy of the bundled iLightBox plugin.
The theme has extensive font choices from Google Fonts, Typekit, Font Squirrel, and Fontdeck, and the option for a cutting-edge SVG logo – so your branding can be pin-sharp, regardless of the users’ device.
To appeal to as many creatives as possible, Uncode has enhanced media library support, enabling integration with Spotify, SoundCloud, Instagram, and more.
Finally, the developers have also included 30-plus demos (each with one-click import) in order to help you get up and running in a hurry. If you need further assistance, their website has extensive documentation, along with a number of narrated video tutorials.
In a nutshell, Uncode is a commendable and worthy theme for all creative types showcasing their work.
7. Oblo
Oblo is an agency and portfolio theme aimed at creative artists.
Whatever medium you use to create your art, Oblo aims to be the theme that has everything you need to share your creative work online. After looking at the Oblo demos, some might even say that the website you create with this theme could be considered a work of art in its own right. If you’re using this theme to create an agency website, and you want to convey your artist side to your target audience, Oblo, with its stylish demos is a particularly strong option.
As this is an agency theme, as well as a portfolio one, it does have some elements that have been included to help you generate leads, close deals, and land clients. If you’d like to use your portfolio website to also grow your following and build your fan base, these features of Oblo should come in handy.
The animation and scrolling effects add another dimension to Oblo.
9. Amedeo
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but you can’t deny that some themes are just more striking than others. If you’re looking for a theme to leave visitors speechless, Amedeo is a great choice.
This theme ships with over a dozen demos you can import, including layouts for gallery landing pages, online art shops, and more. Every design features a tasteful pastel color palette, with a big emphasis on green highlights that make certain elements ‘pop.’
No theme should be only about looks, though. As such, Amedeo comes bundled with the WooCommerce and Contact Form 7 plugins, to help you set up an e-commerce store and let visitors contact you respectively. Combine these tools with its classic design, and you can easily build online shops that are miles ahead of the competition when it comes to style.
If you’re looking for a beautiful theme that also packs a lot of features under the hood, consider ‘swiping right’ on Amedeo!
10. Art
If you believe art should speak for itself, you need a minimalist theme that lets your images do the talking. This is where Art comes into the picture.
This theme is all about minimalism, and this shows in every one of the included demo layouts. In most cases, your galleries take center stage, using plenty of negative space to help draw the eyes where you want them to go.
Despite its outward minimalism, there’s a lot going on under the hood. Amedeo includes a drag-and-drop builder with multiple types of galleries and also comes with plenty of options to customize your website’s typography.
Overall, if you want a website that looks simple yet still includes all of the powerful features you need to draw an audience, Art might be exactly what you’re looking for.
11. Elegant
Elegant does a great job of living up to its name. Having said that, how elegant your website ends up looking is largely down to the imagery you use, because Elegant is a full-width theme that provides a practically blank canvas for your artwork.
Developed by Themify, Elegant comes complete with their proprietary drag-and-drop website builder, which means that you don’t need much in the way of technical chops to put your site together. Furthermore, it doesn’t skimp on page templates, with options available for blog posts, a features page, an agency page, an artist page, a magazine page and an e-commerce store.
From a more practical perspective, Elegant has a 30 day money back guarantee and a year of support and updates, and you get a free alternative theme thrown in with your purchase.
12. Bolge
You don’t see many design agencies with boring websites, and it’s not a coincidence. If you can’t ‘wow’ visitors at first glance, you’ll need help from the right theme. Bolge could be the one for you.
This theme empowers you to create a stylish agency website with over 18 unique home page designs and 25 portfolio layouts. Although every layout is unique, they all share a wonderful pastel color palette, excellent use of typography, and each includes a number of places to add an eye-catching Call To Action (CTA.)
Bolge comes bundled with the WPBakery Page Builder plugin, which means you can customize any of your page elements in seconds. What’s more, you can take your favorite parts from each demo layout to create the design agency website of your dreams.
In a nutshell, success in part requires a theme that looks better than your competition. In our opinion, Bolge might just live up to your standard!
13. Leedo
A modern website requires a contemporary solution. In this case, the solution could be a theme designed to showcase a portfolio, event website, and more – Leedo may be the answer.
Every one of this theme’s demo layouts bleeds color. The layouts themselves admittedly don’t break the mold, but the excellent use of negative space and impactful colors make for designs that are bound to catch your visitor’s eyes.
What’s more, you get to play with a visual portfolio editor that enables you to customize any of those layouts to your heart’s content. The theme comes bundled with the WooCommerce e-commerce plugin, which is great if you’re looking to sell products and services from your website.
A lot of themes sacrifice style for the sake of functionality, but Leedo proves you can have both. Give it a try and add a little bit of color to your life!
14. Artday
Art galleries are usually all light and clean lines, surrounded by beautiful works of art. It’s not an easy feat for a website to replicate that feeling, but with Artday, you might be on the right track.
Artday offers a modern take on an online store. You get to showcase your prints, paintings, and other types of art using minimalistic galleries and beautiful product pages. Both include clean lightboxes and description sections.
However, unlike many other themes, Artday doesn’t ship with pre-built pages. Instead, it empowers you to build a store to your liking by integrating tightly with WooCommerce. It offers features such as custom headers and sliders, email pop-ups, and support for the bundled WPBakery Page Builder plugin. With the last tool, you can easily customize your online store’s design practically any way you want.
If you’re looking for a theme that enables you to showcase and sell your art, with access to powerful features, run an expert eye over Artday.
15. Crafts & Arts
Whether you just want to show off your art or make a living selling it online, you need the right theme. Ideally, you’d choose one that lets you do both — this is precisely where Crafts & Arts comes in.
With Crafts & Arts, you get to play with four unique home page designs. Most of them feature large grid galleries to let you show off your best work. There’s also a portfolio layout you can use to share your biggest accomplishments — perfect if you’re applying for creative work. Overall, the design is minimal, which helps to keep attention on your work.
Crafts & Arts bundles in several plugins, including Revolution Slider, Contact Form 7, Events Calendar, and the WPBakery Page Builder. The theme comes with over 150 custom elements you can use to populate your designs, such as portfolio categories, custom details, and more. Plus, it integrates with the free WooCommerce plugin, which makes it an excellent option to sell your art online.
All in all, we think Crafts & Arts is going to appeal if you want to bypass online marketplaces and set up shop for yourself. If this sounds like you, the theme is well worth a closer look.
16. Red Art
You’d be forgiven for thinking that your website should appear functional, especially if you look at business-focused websites. Enter Red Art, where modern design meets artistic sensibilities.
This theme shines when it comes to photography websites and portfolio layouts. It packs in dozens of design options and demos to choose from, any of which looks professional enough for a business website. This means you can use the theme to promote your services, and you can also set up an online e-commerce store using the bundled WooCommerce plugin.
Considering how versatile its designs are, Red Art also needs functionality to match that style. Fortunately, the bundled WPBakery Page Builder plugin lets you easily customize any of its layouts, even if you don’t have any experience building websites.
If you want a theme that can help you both show off your work and profit from it, you need a versatile option such as Red Art – check it out for yourself!
17. Zass
Being an artist has never been easy. However, having an online marketplace to promote your work is a boon. If you can’t find the right marketplace, you can create it using the right theme. Zass might be the perfect option to help you pull it off.
This theme caters to single stores and fully-fledged online marketplaces for multiple vendors. As such, it includes a multitude of pre-built store designs you can use, all of which are highly minimalistic to keep the focus on the products.
With Zass, while you get a theme that’s WooCommerce compatible, you’ll find the WP Marketplace plugin bundled in. This enables you to transform your store into a platform where anyone can sell their art. Thanks to Zass, vendors can keep track of sales, reviews, and much more.
Overall, Zass is a fantastic option that includes almost all the functionality you need. As such, take a look at the demo and prepare to open your wallet!
