I am going to be selling printed art work, photography and other physical media and I am looking for clues on where to start with a theme that supports selecting artwork and then selecting the size they wish to buy, and in the future I would like users to be able to pick the media to print on, etc.
I will suggest you start simple and slowly build it from there. The more simple themes are generally much faster and easier to understand. The new theme Dawn, that utilize all the best in the new Online Shop 2.0 should be out very soon.
Setting up a shop for selling your printed media should be easy. If you want people to select from print setting it up as product variants is a good option.
I would just go ahead. Setup the shop, go through the various basic setting nd add a few of your products. If you need help you can find a lot here at the forum. Just ask for specific challenges and you will get really fast and good help.
Good luck 
Understood and thanks for the response, but the trial length is only 2 weeks, so I need to find others who have used Shopify to do what I am trying to do, to validate that not only can Shopify manage it, but manage it the way I feel works. So far I found that people really only sell single products, and fill up the store by adding the same item with just a different color. That doesn’t work for my artwork. You pick the work and then pick the size.
So I am looking for art based stores, so I can see how they did it, and which templates they use.
I am working on two shops at the moment - one for myself and one for a large fashion client.
My won shop is with art too. I am also a ceramic artist and the shop will feature mostly unique hand made pottery. Adding new pots is very easy and fast. That also goes for new variants of pots I produce at larger scale.
The fashion client add 6-800 new products a month. That too is quite easy.
Off course, preparing everything - having images ready, the text and any META-data you need takes some time. But that is the same no matter which shopping platform you chose. But when you have that I do think that adding/uploading it to Shopify is faster than most other platforms I have used.