Uncomfortable

2022-07-06 18:43

Try asking this over on /r/artistlounge. This subreddit is reserved for those working through the lessons on drawabox.com, as explained here.

That said, while I understand your worries, this manner of thinking is only going to limit you in the future. The fear of having one's work used inappropriately by others is certainly not abnormal, but giving into it effectively forces one to punish themselves for things that may occur, and things whose impact on you may be minimal if they do occur.

I've been drawing and posting my art online for almost the last two decades, and while I have had a logo design taken by some company to print on t-shirts, this had absolutely no impact on me whatsoever - because I wasn't selling that logo on shirts. If I had been, then it's also unlikely that the audience I was targeting would be bothering with some random, sketchy online store based in china, so I don't expect I'd have lost much in the way of sales anyway.

Conversely, if I were so afraid of all the possibilities of people stealing my work and taking credit for it, I could have slapped a watermark on each and every piece - but doing so would have effectively messed with the composition of those pieces themselves, because stamping another graphic on top is going to impact the way in which the viewer perceives the work. It becomes distracting, and when you're specifically composing a piece to guide the eye around it in a certain way, messing it up with a semi-transparent watermark begs the question - why did I bother in the first place.

Of course, the alternative is not to post anything online at all... which I certainly wouldn't argue against, but it sure does seem like a loss for the others who might enjoy your work, and for the things you might one day be able to achieve with them.

While I have resolved not to concern myself with what other people do, so long as it does not infringe upon my own brand and my ability to do the things that make me happy, there is one simple suggestion I have that will generally make the worries of art-theft a non-issue: never upload anything in a larger resolution than is needed. The resolution needed to display something in a gratifying way on a monitor or a TV is actually pretty low. 72ppi is what was used historically, though I'm unsure about these days with 4k displays - but even those lower resolution images look fine when scaled up on a denser display.

Print, however, varies a lot. You need 300 pixels per inch - fall too far below that threshold and your image will appear blurry and indistinct. So, in order to create physical merchandise that doesn't look like total garbage, you need more resolution. So, down-size your images before you upload them to be shared, but keep the high resolution versions yourself. Should anything happen, at best the culprit will only be able to sell a shoddy piece of merchandise, leaving you free to sell merch at a higher quality should you so choose in the future. Furthermore, if someone for whatever reason claims that you're uploading their work, you'll be able to show screenshots of zoomed-in sections of a given piece to prove that you have the original files, which the other party would not be able to do. Of course, this sort of thing rarely ever happens.

All that said, being aware of things that can happen is fine, but don't limit yourself based on possibilities - especially not ones that are so unlikely to occur, and even less likely to have any impact on you.