Rant time!
I must remember to never do reverse image searches on my work. Every time I do I end up pissed and start putting Huge watermarks on my pictures of paintings, drawings, and tattoos. Thieves! So many thieves, and they are often not in countries where you can do anything about it. Then if they are you usually find them to be some jackass without a pot to piss in and nothing to lose so they don’t give a crud. They aren’t making money off it so recourse is zero. At best you can spend a bunch of cash and time to deal with them. The clipart sites are the worst. Thieves! The second worse are the “Tattoo design” sites. They sell or offer free tattoo designs, often to shops. Now there are packs with tattoo “templates” for newer tattooers to use with their digital drawing tools as well that just rip off peoples stuff. At least give the artists credit you fucks. I’d guess there are a good thousand plus of my original tattoo designs out there being used right now with zero artist credits or credited to themselves. That doesn’t even count the hundreds of thousands of “original” designs by new artists who think original means snagging my shit (or someone else) and changing a frigg’n leaf or moving an eyelash and saying “I drew that.” I have even seen my drawings on people as tattoos by people who claimed it as theirs. So annoying. Don’t mistake my annoyance with art thieves as annoyance with people using other peoples art for tattoos. I straight up sold thousands of sets of tattoo flash (designs) to individuals and shops over the years. They were meant for other tattooers to tattoo them on people. I also taught classes at conventions, did seminars, etc. Materials included art. I tattoo all sorts of stuff I didn’t create. I use other peoples art for inspiration pretty often. You can see me talking about this in my post After Munch’s Kiss by the Window for example. Inspiration! I then titled it as is proper. Also we can’t always credit an artist or we don’t need to credit it because of it’s association with other things. Example = A Green Day Bunny tattoo. I do not claim to have created the art. Thieves!
So, that rant came from me seeing some thieving of my stuff I didn’t like in a way I didn’t like, then making the mistake of reverse image searching it to find more foul play I didn’t approve of. While doing this I was supposed to be searching for some pictures of a girls arm and measurments to draw her up some stuff. I saw a pic of some one shot freshie peonies I did around the time I took the other pictures and decided to post a pic. WATERMARKS! ha ha ha… rip this off dip sticks.
Now is where it all gets funny. I start sticking Aarron.com all over this tattoo I did of some peonies.
They are drawn in a style I draw as is obvious if you follow my art blog.
I do almost always reference flowers though. Even ones such as these which I have drawn various renditions of over and over and over.
I cannot for the life of me recall if these are 100% freehanded Bic pen on the arm, or if I made a stencil, or if I drew them up from scratch if I did use a stencil, or what I referenced, or if I referenced … how much???? If I didn’t draw it or cheesed it hard, does that make me guilty of theft as well? No, I don’t think so as we are now looking at a specific illustration style, a common subject matter, and a non statement with no character changes beyond it’s being brought from nature to an illustration. With all that said, I’d assume I just looked up peonies on my phone and from a mix of whatever photos popped up of actual peonies either quick sketched it on paper to the required dimensions and then maybe cleaned it up, or… I googled and did the same thing, but directly on skin with a pen before tattooing.
Pictures of tattoos aren’t sold. They have no monetary worth. Why would they be stolen you may ask yourself. It is because ass-wipes use them to promote themselves by trying to pass off other peoples work as their own. Yes, that is a thing. It is a huge thing. I have even found my own work and work of other people I know in physical portfolios of tattooists and on walls in shops. They usually pic things they would like to do stylistically. They pick pieces that are beyond them, but they aspire to. They rarely pick fancy signature style pieces, but they do that as well. You won’t see many ripping off pics of larger or more unique themes. It is often the most common of themes. Peonies and the like. Usually they are one shot pieces like this one I have posted above. Things that take between an hour up to maybe four-ish hours are normal. People flipping through books don’t pay that close of attention usually, they are just getting a basic judgment. Tattoos of the one shot type are almost always believable as anybody’s. It isn’t questioned. These people who thieve like that are scum. None of them can pull off what they rip off. They are trying to fool clients into thinking they are better than they are. I have in person said “This is mine” on more than one occasion. The response is always some variation of “I didn’t put my name on it, I’m just using it as an example.” If you have a book of tattoo photos and you tattoo, people will assume they are yours. Everyone knows this. It is a total bullshit excuse. The internet has helped slow it down in a way because many just have online portfolios. Easier for people to call bull-pucky. It also has made it worse though as it is easy to snag the images and the people who are thieving aren’t usually the people with eyes on them in general. Grr… Alrighty, ending my long winded rant about art theft and Douch-bag tattooers.
The tattoo above = Quick one shot freshie peonies. Bicep, and poor girl had to suffer some leaves on the inside bend of her arm. Lovely spot that… sensitive and gets agitated quickly. Didn’t have to listen to me rant. She was just playing her tunes. End of story.
