Artistic License

I was robbed. Sort of.

I never sign my artwork or anything because I don't think it's good enough that anyone would actually want it. I can't do colours for the life of me and all I'm really good at is drawing line-art with pencils.

Once I asked someone to critique my work. I started out with the warning that I only draw "like two times a year." Their response? "Maybe you should think about making that ZERO times a year."

Don't get me wrong, though. For what I'm doing, I do it better than most. I could sell something to an average tourist and they'd think it was fantastic. Art-world in consideration, though, I barely classify as a hobbyist in the professional's mindset.

When I'd heard that a website had stolen a bunch of work from a forum that I post on, I didn't think much of it. I'd only ever posted one actual piece there, line-art, and it wasn't the top of my skills pile anyway.

But, out of curiosity, I went to the site that had ripped off our work and started browsing through the thirty-one pages of content they'd taken. Really, I wanted to see what was deemed good enough to be worth stealing versus all of the art that I usually see there.

I kept telling myself that mine wouldn't be there because it wasn't color, because it was too light, because it just wasn't as good, but eventually there it was. I wasn't even angry at first. At first, I was sort of happy and took it as a compliment that they thought mine was good enough to take.

Then I clicked on it.

You could only advance to actually seeing the artwork by paying a fee to the website hosting the "borrowed" content. Essentially, they ripped off about fifty different artists and are trying to charge people to view their work.

There's really nothing that the artists, even all of us put together, can do about it. Hiring a lawyer would be entirely too expensive, and frankly I don't care enough to jump on that bandwagon with the fanatics. It just pissed me off that there was something I was trying to offer for free out of the satisfaction I got from creating it, and some asshat steals it in three seconds and is making money off of it.

There's probably a lesson in there somewhere about karma and downloading music, but I'm going to pretend there isn't since their situation is the total opposite.

At the very least, I'm trying to use it as mild inspiration to make more pieces. Maybe eventually I'll be able to draw something other than women and demons.