Indie's Tips For Starting a Gallery

     Have you always wanted to start your own gallery but you’ve never been quite sure where to start or what to fill it with? Well I, Indie, a self-proclaimed gallery expert *cough cough* am here to give you some tips on doing just that! I myself have 2 galleries, one on my main account, it is Christmas themed and is size 48 at the time of writing this which means it can hold up to 240 items. However on my side account I have a very small, limited gallery where I collect perfumes, colognes, fur sprays and other things to do with scent. That gallery is only size 4 currently which can hold 20 items. I’ll be referencing both of my galleries throughout this article!

     Tip One: Think about how much you’re willing to spend on this gallery. If you’re someone who struggles to make Neopoints or you have something big going on, such as aiming for a Gourmet Food trophy for one of your Neopets, maybe you’ll just want something small to display some fun items that you are proud of. Opening a gallery only costs 150NP which will start you off with 5 spaces to hold items, this is a size 1 gallery. After that, the cost goes up by 200NP per size and you get an extra 5 spaces per upgrade. While this can only cost you a few hundred NP at the start, once you have done many upgrades, you may end up paying thousands of NP! My Christmas gallery at size 48 costs 9,600NP to upgrade, which again, only gives me 5 more slots. Meanwhile my small perfume gallery will only cost a few hundred NP to upgrade. So this is a good place to start when considering what kind of gallery you want and how big you’d like it to be. Remember, the costs I’ve mentioned are only the upgrades for the gallery itself, that’s not including any and all items you might want to buy to put in it!

     Tip Two: Admittedly you may want to consider this the first step, or you may want to think about this at the same time. This is, what do you want your gallery theme to be? Do you want a theme at all? This can be influenced by how much you want to spend on your gallery. My Christmas gallery is the kind of theme where there will always be many many new holiday themed items coming out (especially with the Advent Calendar) that I’m going to want to collect and put into it. However with my perfume gallery, there are 16 items in it so far and only a little over 50 more that I would like to add to it at this time. Your theme could be anything you can find in Neopets. You might want to choose a very broad subject such as collecting anything Faerie related or anything involving your favourite Neopet/Petpet/Petpetpet. You might want to narrow it down to something as limited as, say, Spooky Food. Some people put extremely rare and/or expensive items in their galleries so you could even do something like a gallery dedicated entirely to Paint Brushes or things you can only buy from the Hidden Tower. It’s completely and totally up to you!

     Tip Two and a Half: Are you interested in the Gallery spotlight competition? Then your best bet is to come up with a really original theme for your gallery. Scroll through the Spotlight winners not only to check out the competition, but they may inspire you to collect something completely different than what you might have already planned!

     Tip Three: Prioritize what items you want and how much you’re willing to spend to get said items. There are so many shops in Neopia that you can buy from! Or you could just buy from other players, whether that’s through the Marketplace, the Auction House or the Trading Post. For me both of my themes are very easily accessible through a lot of the shops in Neopia so I have fun refreshing shopkeepers and checking out their wares. A good way to prioritize is to make a wish list and rank it. Cross items off when you’ve found them and make sure to keep it handy while you’re shopping for your gallery! It’s awful when you splurge on something only to realize that you had it in there already.

     Tip Four: Ranking and categorizing. I would suggest ranking your items and creating categories for them if you’re going for a more broad theme. My bigger gallery has 10 themes and not only are the items ranked on the “All Items” page, but they’re also meticulously ranked within their categories. I don’t necessarily group everything by categories on the All Items page, I like to prioritize what I find to be the most appealing to look at. But it’s totally up to you how serious you are about ranking and categorizing items. Once you’ve started keep up at it too! It can be very overwhelming if you forget to rank things then suddenly go and check your beautiful gallery only for it to be in total disarray.

     Tip Five: Don’t commit to anything terribly expensive if you’re not completely dedicated to your gallery theme unless it’s something that you can easily resell and at least get your money back. It took me years just to pluck up the courage to put a Christmas Petpet Paint Brush in my gallery and I haven’t yet put a Christmas Paint Brush in it!

     Tip Six: Don’t restrict yourself just because you’re worried that your gallery theme (or lack thereof) isn’t super original. I mean, I’m sure there are thousands of Christmas themed galleries in Neopia, but you know what? I love my theme and I love my gallery. Scrolling through the 200+ items and seeing what I’ve collected, been given and bargained for over my nearly 8 years on this website gives me such a feeling of pride and happiness. So what if you’ve already seen 5 chocolate themed galleries? Sure, plushies might be a dime a dozen or maybe you feel like not having a theme makes your gallery less than someone else’s. Be proud of what you have achieved! Feel good scrolling through your gallery and knowing that sure, maybe you put Halloween cookies next to a Tyrannian weapon, but I bet you worked your behind off to afford those items! Look at the soaps your Neofriend sent you for your perfume gallery (hint hint) and know that hey, they might not be what you were originally wanting, but that friend was so sweet to think of you when they saw those items. So go out there, get organized or disorganized, spend 100NP or 1,000,000NP and show Neopia your collections!!