Portals to Nowhere

I was playing around in my virtual 3D space and I created this today. Really the portals are just a piece of a larger model I was working on, but after modeling and laying out UV's I decided to just make a picture with that one piece.

I also enlisted the services of one of the materials I created back in my brief affair with Substance Designer.

Honestly I don't have much else to say about this image. It's just something I made because I'm always making things. I do want to take this time to address something I read on Steem earlier today that I want to comment on.

It was a post about copyrights and credit in work and stealing and plagiarism etc.

So there's this notion/culture on Steem that if you post some art, you should also talk a little about how you made it or show your process or something along these lines. When I first got started on Steem I needed to adapt to posting this way. In time I understood the practical reason behind it, but it's not what most people think. It's not because that's the standard, or the "right way" or the thing you "should" do. It's because most people here aren't artists and without a bit of explanation, if you're posting art it's not something that a non-artist can relate to as well without some breakdown of what they're seeing. You need to cater to your audience or else it's like doing stand up in America but speaking Swahili.

This is actually totally NOT the standard especially when it comes to professional artists posting their work online. It is also NOT the standard that if I do a painting of a person from life or from a photo, to credit either the model or the photo or photographer. That might seem counter-intuitive because you might wonder what could be wrong with either of those things?

The answer might be hard to relate to if you're not an artist, but if I paint something from a photo reference, I am not "copying" the photo. In the end, typically, my painting looks nothing like the original photo. The photo is a reference. Let's start at an extreme to make this easier to understand.

Previously I've posted this imaginary character.

The image in the middle is the reference sheet I used to come up with the character. I had a couple actors in mind and while the character has some similarities of both, in the end these references are the means to create something original. All art is created this way. This idea that artists sit in front of a blank piece of paper or screen and that's how they work is a false notion. Don't get me wrong, I can draw characters completely from my imagination, but if I were doing serious character design, as I have done, professionally, that's not the way I would do it and that's not the way most professionals would.

So more than likely no one would look at that and say, HEY! You need to credit those actors and the photographers that took their pictures because you used their work! Like I said, start with an extreme example first.

Now let's get into something more murky.

The only difference between this and the previous drawing is "how much" I referenced the reference material. Other references not shown are old master paintings, specifically ones by Nicolai Fechin whose work I was drawing from when I painted this, plus all the decades of experience and inspiration that can't really be summed up into a few references.

The key is, the new thing created is a new and original thing. Unless you are DIRECTLY using another person's photo in your work, it is not a thing to go through a list of credits for each piece you make.

So by directly I mean, YOU take a photo, create a painting, make something I have access to. I take that thing, and simply modify it, that's a bit of a different story. I would actually ponder why that's even worth posting unless it's a collage or something like that, but then you get into a grey area of "Well, how much did you change it?"

Here is the actual standard practice, and what is common online as well as what is legal. Also keep in mind, I am a professional artist, it's the only thing I do, and I teach at an art school and have taught there for years. I hate to pull the "I'm a professional, so you should listen to me" card, but I want more professional artists coming to post on Steem, and I don't want the culture to go any more down the wrong path than it already is.

If you directly use another person's work in your work, you credit them, otherwise it's not necessary because you created something as original as art can be. Everything is built from something that came before. Otherwise we'd still be painting on cave walls.

That is the common practice. In terms of legality, it's a lot more complicated and the protections for you as an artist aren't great. The moment you create something it is automatically copyrighted, but unless you register your copyright, you can't sue for damages. Also, to sue someone for using your work, you have to prove damages. This is almost impossible to do or worth it unless some big company used your artwork in a product they were selling(rejoice if this happens to you, you're about to get PAID). The reality is, if someone stole your art and posted it on their blog, or they modified your work without your permission, there's pretty much nothing you can do about that from a legal standpoint, again unless they use it in a way where they're making a lot of money(which is rare, if they're making a lot of money they can afford to not steal art, artists are pretty cheap relatively) This happens all the time to friends of mine who post on say instagram. There are accounts there that just post art from other artists, as generic concept art accounts or animation art or whatever. The problem is a lot of times they don't credit the original artist so they'll get a lot of attention and followers instead of the artist.

I personally am not into social media and likes and followers all that much, but if that happened here on Steem it would be super annoying. Great thing about Steem is they would get flagged to death pretty quick, so that's the real answer for all those artists, I digress...

Legit plagiarism, ie I take someone else's work and claim it as my own, should of course be met with extreme prejudice. I also know that we have to be especially vigilant against fraudsters as anyone can just impersonate an artist here and start posting their work. In my mind these are a given.

What I'd like to see is a more post and let post attitude here. If it's confirmed that a person is a real person, but they're not following some made up guidelines that only exist on Steem, if you don't like it, don't upvote it, but I don't think it's good for Steem to go around telling people how to post. If they ask for help, or if you give them pointers in that spirit, like "That's a cool drawing, but if you actually want some upvotes you gotta play to the crowd here" I think that's a bit better and less offputting than, accusatory "Where's the credit list?!?!" "Did you steal that?!?!" Chill. Be cool. Let's work together to make this a fun place that people want to be.

Okay, that was a long rant, it had been on my mind for a minute though, the post today just reinvigorated it.

BTW, this is not an attack on that post. I agree with the vast majority of it. It just made me think of these points I wanted to address. Okay, I'm done ranting about this for real now! See you all in the next post.