Adding a new artwork

One artwork is one product with four variants: the original and its three print sizes. No script, no linked products, no developer. About three minutes.

Always start by duplicating — never “Add product”

In Shopify admin, open Template — new artwork (it’s a draft, so it never appears on the site), then Duplicate. Any existing artwork works too.

Duplicating carries over the four variants, their exact names, the tracked/untracked settings and the empty art. fields — which is the whole of the fiddly part. Starting from a blank product means typing the variant names by hand, and a typo silently removes the work from the Originals or Prints page.

The four variants — names must match exactly

The Catalogue, Originals and Prints pages find work by reading these names. They are not labels; they are how the site knows what it’s looking at. This is the one thing worth checking twice.

Variant name	Price	Inventory
`Original`	the original’s price	Track quantity, set to 1
`Print — 8×10`	$30	Do not track
`Print — 11×14`	$35	Do not track
`Print — 16×20`	$55	Do not track

Two characters catch people out: the dash in Print — is a long dash (—), not a hyphen, and the × in 8×10 is a multiplication sign, not the letter x. Duplicating means you never have to type either. If you do need them, copy from here:

Original · Print — 8×10 · Print — 11×14 · Print — 16×20

Selling only prints, with no original available? Delete the Original variant and keep the three print sizes. Selling only the original? Keep Original alone. Bursts prints are 8×10 and 11×14 only — those works have no 16×20.

Step by step

Duplicate Template — new artwork.
Title it. Untitled works are fine — set art.plate_no so “Untitled · No. 4” stays distinguishable.
Price the Original variant. The print prices come across already set.
Set the Original variant’s quantity to 1. Leave the three print variants untracked — prints are made to order and never run out.
Upload the image. Highest resolution you have — a print is made from this file, so a phone screenshot will print badly.
Fill the art. fields (table below). medium, series and the dimensions matter most.
Add it to its series collection — Recent Works, Notebook #1, and so on. Catalogue, Originals and Prints look after themselves.
Set status to Active and save.
Map it in Prodigi — see below. Skipping this is the one mistake that costs money.

Prodigi — still the one manual step

Apps → Prodigi → the Shopify channel → find the new product → toggle it on, then map each print variant to Hahnemühle German Etching at the matching size.

Leave the Original variant toggled OFF. It is a one-off physical artwork; there is nothing for a print lab to make, and mapping it would send your original away to be reproduced.

Prodigi is set to ignore new products, so nothing maps itself. Miss this and an order for that print sits in Shopify doing nothing, with no error and no email. If a product isn’t in Prodigi’s list, look under Ignored — unmapped products are hidden from the default view.

When a work sells

Set the Original variant’s quantity to 0. That is all — the site marks it Sold everywhere: the badge on the image, the price line, the search results, the series pages. The three print variants stay on sale, which is the point: the image lives on after the original goes.

Setting art.status to sold does the same job and is there for work sold away from the site, where there is no Shopify order to reduce the quantity. Either one alone is enough; you never need both.

Use art.status = not_for_sale for work you are keeping, and reserved for work on hold.

The `art.` fields

Field	Type	Note
`art.medium`	text	“Acrylic and oil pastel on paper”
`art.substrate`	text	paper / posterboard / canvas / board. Canvas adds the rolled-vs-stretched shipping note.
`art.width_in` / `art.height_in`	decimal	Inches, of the original. Centimetres are worked out for you.
`art.dimensions_verified`	boolean	Tick only when you have actually measured it. Until then the product page shows a warning and the scale visualiser stays hidden.
`art.year`	integer	2026
`art.series` / `art.section`	text	“Notebook #1” / “The Prophets”. Sets the eyebrow and drives Related.
`art.story`	rich text	2–4 sentences, first person — the pull-quote on the page.
`art.status`	text	available / reserved / sold / not_for_sale. Describes the original.
`art.signed` / `art.coa`	boolean	Signed / certificate included. These describe the original — prints are always unsigned with no certificate.
`art.plate_no`	integer	Distinguishes untitled works: “Untitled · No. 4”.
`art.poem`	multi-line text	Notebook works. Paste exactly as written — keep the lowercase, the line breaks and any spelling. Don’t fix typos.
`art.orientation`	text	portrait / landscape / square
`art.detail_note`	text	Caption for the detail shot.
`art.depth_in`	decimal	Canvas only.
`art.archive`	boolean	Earlier work — shown visually separated.
`art.print_dimensions`	text	Optional note on the edition block.

Images: 1 = the full work straight on, 2 = a detail or texture shot, 3 = in situ for scale. The first image is what a print is made from.

If you knew the old way

Every artwork used to be two products — an original and a separate print — created by a script and joined by linked_original / linked_print. That is gone. One product, four variants, and those two fields are no longer used. There is no script to run and nothing to ask a developer for: the only step outside Shopify is mapping the prints in Prodigi.