Art Life Lesson #7933201...

Pinterest, on the surface, seems like a great concept... a place to share everything you find that you like with everyone else. I started a profile there, but soon lost interest. My main concern is over 'intellectual property' aka rights of the artists. There is so much pinning and re-pinning of images that it is often the case that the name of the original artist is difficult or impossible to trace. 

 

This is also especially true of blog posts. If the author does not include credits with their images, the information is lost. I recently saw a blog post share that was about beautiful photographs... not one credit in the lot. Five out of 32 had the artists' watermarks in the image. I recognized one of the uncredited from a website I had seen. This troubled me, but it also validated marking all of my images.

 

But I seem to have made a mistake on one of my Etsy posts. The painting 'Polar Bear' has since sold, but today I discovered the image on Pinterest. I am incredibly flattered at this but at the same time annoyed with myself that I used the unmarked photo for the listing. Fortunately for me, the re-pins I found so far give me credit and trace to Etsy. But I often see others' work that don't.

 

If any one ever sees images of my work without a watermark floating around on the internet please let me know. I will be very grateful. (I have posted some thumbnail sizes without marks and this is fine.)

 

Since the 'Polar Bear' watercolor is already out there (it would take too much work to track it all down and have removed) I will consider it a life lesson and let it go (and recheck all my images on my Etsy site).

 

So... I share it with you here. Save it if you wish, print, make a greeting card... whatever you want. I right-clicked and saved the one from Pinterest to see what size it is and am sharing it here now.

 

Larger, higher quality prints are still available in my Fine Art America shop.

Enjoy!