Suzy Clarke's Blazing Heart Studios (suzyclarke.com or blazingheartstudios.com) is an online portfolio for Suzy Clarke, an exciting artist whose paintings are full of exuberant life, color, and inspiration.

There were several design challenges when creating this web site. The design needed to be simple yet sophisticated so that Suzy's paintings are the visual focus. The pages must to load quickly even though the images are of high quality. The images themselves need to be a little challenging for average people to "borrow". Art patrons need to have both an overview of everything the site has to offer but also a means to leisurely browse and savor each of the paintings. The technical aspect of the design had to be set up to facilitate minimum maintenance because Suzy likes to change both the paintings and the galleries periodically.

All of these challenges were met. We'll only discuss the solutions to a couple of them. The galleries were set up with multiple levels of expandable thumbnail sized representations of each of the paintings. A visit to the fine art originals page takes you to a list of the current galleries with a representative painting of each and an arrow which invites you click on it to start viewing the paintings in that gallery. If you do so, you are treated to a grouping of thumbnail sized images which include the first 6-8 images in the gallery plus another arrow which invites you to click on it to see more paintings in that grouping. So far, most of the galleries we have set up expand twice; some expand three times. There are multiple ways to view a gallery of images. You can see all the thumbnails first or you can switch to larger copies of any of the paintings at any time by simply clicking on a thumbnail image, and scroll through large copies of the paintings one at a time.

Suzy works mostly in acrylics with heavy impasto and bold brush strokes which show up nicely on close ups of the paintings, so to take advantage of this and add the ability for the viewers to interact with the paintings, in some cases, you can roll your mouse over the image and see a close up. In some cases, you can zoom in on different parts of the same painting depending on what part of it you roll your mouse over. Happy Exploring!