i create artwork to make people happy. i share that work on social media and i always include my website or name (or both) on my work.
i spent the past five years building my career. i spent my entire life acquiring an understanding of light, color, composition and rhythm – components that i believe make my work unique. each illustration i create has drawn upon these hours, days and weeks of practice. my illustrations are inspired by my life. each piece is a peek into a moment, a memory or my imagination. my artwork is an extension of who i am.
recently my work went “viral” and dozens of websites and facebook pages shared my everyday love with captions added (side note, i do not allow any modification of my artwork under my copyright, including adding captions). in the beginning, my name and website were shared along with the pieces. slowly but surely, as my work was re-shared, my name and website were dropped. in fact many of the posts intentionally cropped my work to remove my name from the bottom! these sites use my work to promote their own brands without citing the source. i LOVE that thousands of people enjoy my work and feel a connection to it – but i do not appreciate my artwork being shared without my name or a link to my site.
here’s just one screen shot (there are countless others):
i created the art and i deserve credit.
everyday love art is our family business. we built it through years of support and sacrifice. i love creating art and we love sending our cards and prints around the world. i need to make and sell art to continue creating. i do not need to spend time writing posts like these, chasing copyright violations and worrying about it. i encourage you to report any posts that shares artwork without credit, whether its mine or another artist’s. that’s the proper, respectful thing to do.
i hope that assigning proper credit will become the new web standard. then i can focus solely on creating artwork to make people happy – that’s all i’ve ever wanted to do.
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