journeyofbell:

This is a summary of a talk by a lawyer specialised in copyright that I’ve been allowed to pass on. He’s that kind of guy who knows everything there is to know about copyright and what you can and can’t do. The talk centered around creative work and especially the role of copyright on the Internet.

• Copyright isn’t something you can get, it’s something you have. Your work is protected by copyright internationally. While there are some differences in certain countries, copyright is overall protecting creators everywhere around the world and across borders.
  
• Copyright protects all kinds of work: art, music, photography, design and so forth. It doesn’t require a watermark or anything like that (although many creatives use it to be sure it’s not stolen for commercial purposes).
  
• It is not permitted to use someone else’s work unless otherwise is stated in text. Some creators make their work free but you have to prove this with a license or alike. It’s also your responsibilty to know whether the license is personal, commercial or both before using it.
• Moral rights are important and means that you have the right to be credited for your work. Doesn’t matter where, how or when: if they don’t credit you, it’s copyright infringement.
• Copyright is valid regardless of where you see it, including the Internet. Putting original work online does not cancel copyright and it’s not an argument you can use if you take other people’s work and put it online without credit. You’re still infringing copyright if you don’t credit and/or pay the creator for using their work.
• This rule also includes fan art, even if people say otherwise. If it’s a piece made by you, it’s still protected by copyright. Fan art does not cancel copyright either (I can’t stress this enough because the lawyer didn’t even let me finish my question before he said: “That’s bullshit and they can’t; it’s still copyright infringement”. REMEMBER THAT.)
• As a fan artist, it’s your responsibility to avoid copyright infringement as well. Most big companies don’t care about fan art as long as you’re not making money of it. It’s your own fault if you make money from fan art and they sue you.
  
• Copyright protects all of your work from beginning to end. It’s not just the finished piece that’s protected: sketches, concept art and alike are protected by copyright as well.
  
• It is completely legal to sue people for infringing your work. If they don’t credit you and refuse to do so and/or remove your work, you can sue them. It doesn’t matter how they do it: everything from putting it on their blog without credits to downright reselling it counts as infringement.
• The main problem with copyright isn’t really whether or not the copyright is valid: it’s how it’s handled in different countries. EU protects creators across the countries that are members but it often requires a lawyer from the same country as the person infringing your rights.
• Make sure it pays off to make a case. For the most part, creatives just want to stop people/companies from sharing their work without permission. If they refuse, you can threathen them with a case. If they resell your work, you can most definitely make a case. You can also require compensation depending on the problem.
• People/companies don’t always take individuals seriously but they do with lawyers and associations. For the most part they just don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and the money it will cost them, thus they just give up right away. Not a guarantee but it works in most cases.
• Ideas are not protected by copyright. If two persons accidentally make a piece similar to each other, they can’t sue because ideas don’t have rights like finished work. It only counts when someone directly copies the work you’ve made. The only way you can protect an idea is to take out patent for it (and even then the idea has to meet certain standards to be protected).
• Tracing, reproducing and reselling original work is also illegal. This should be obvious by now. If you trace or reproduce for the sake of practice, you have to credit the original creator, otherwise they’re able to sue.
• If the piece is created by two persons or more, the copyright applies to all of them. This means that one person can’t just sell it or hand over the rights to someone else without the other creators’ permission.
• If you make a commission for someone, they only get a license (unless you agree otherwise). This means that the work isn’t owned by the person making the commission. It still belongs to the original creator, must be sourced when shown to others, and can’t be modified or resold.
• If you make design work (for example a logo) for someone else, you have to make a contract stating the rules of use. This is freestyle because it’s up to you. Some questions you can ask: does is apply to only this work or future works? Do they only get a license or do you give away the work with its rights? These are just suggestions but it’s a good idea to have on paper so that you can look back at it in case of a dispute.
• Beware of social media! Some sites like Facebook have rules that apply when you are a member. If you upload your original work there, Facebook technically owns it and can use it however they please as long as they do it it within Facebook as a website.
• Always document infringement of copyright. If you have to make a case out of it or just want someone to remove your work, it’s a good idea to make screencaps of the problem and save any e-mails if you communicate with the person/company in question.
• As a general rule, your work is protected when you’re alive and 70 years after your death. So yeah, even when dead, people can’t use your work right away!

Final note: This is NOT something I just made up, it is the LAW. These are the current rules and laws in 2016 and if you don’t believe me, you can ask the lawyer himself.

sasharjones:

There are a few programs I use on an almost daily basis as an artist and illustrator which I find invaluable, but that seem to be unfortunately more secret than they deserve to be. Which is too bad, because they solve a lot of small workflow problems that I think a number of people would find useful!

I’ll keep this list limited to my big three, but it is organized in order of usefulness. (And incidentally of compatibility, as the latter two are Windows-only. Sorry! Please do still check out PureRef though, Mac users.)

1. PureRef

PureRef is a program specifically designed to make it easier to view, sort, and work with your references. I actually put off downloading it initially because it seemed redundant– couldn’t I just paste the refs into my PSD files? Indeed, the only real barrier to working with PureRef is that learning the keyboard shortcuts and the clicks to move around the program takes a little while. But getting over that hump is well worth it, because it has some distinct advantages over trying to organize your refs in your actual art program.

Firstly, you’re no longer bogging down your actual PSD file with extra layers, nor having to fight with said layers at all– PureRef has no layer panel, so you never have to scramble to grab the right one. All images you paste into the program retain their original resolution data, so you can resize, rotate, crop, etc as needed without distortion. If you find yourself needing to adjust the values, color, etc of a ref image, you can just copy paste it into Photoshop, make your adjustments, and copy paste it back into PureRef.

The other great advantage is that you can toggle the program as ‘Stay On Top’ and keep it above Photoshop (or whatever else)– which was always a problem when trying to make a reference collage in a separate PSD file. I find that I just don’t look at my references as much as I should when they are on a second monitor, and this solves that problem.

I’ve used it religiously for about a year now, creating a new PureRef file for every illustration I do, as well as a few for specific characters, cultures, or settings in personal projects. As you can see in the example above, I like to sort my images into little clusters or ‘islands’ of specific content, so that I can easily scroll out to see the entire reference map, then zoom in to the relevant cluster easily.

There is one big tip I would suggest for using this program, if you have the harddrive space: As soon as you get it, turn on the ‘Embed local images in save file’ option. This will make your PureRef files bigger, but you’ll never have to deal with a ‘broken link’ if you move around the source files you originally dragged in.

2. Work Timer

This is such a simple little app that it doesn’t have a very formal name, though I think of it as ‘Work’ or ‘Work Work’ (for some reason.) It’s a timer that counts when your cursor is active in any (of up to 3) program you set it to count for, and stops counting when you change programs or idle. No starting, pausing, stopping, or forgetting to do any of those three things.

I use this one to accurately track my hours, both to inform myself and for commissions or other client work. At the end of a work session, I take the hours counted and add them to the hours I’ve already spent on that image in a spreadsheet.

I have it set to count my three art programs (Photoshop, Painter, and Manga Studio), so based on the settings I use, it doesn’t count time that I spend doing relevant work in my browser (such as looking up an email to double check character descriptions or ref hunting), so to counter that, I set the ‘Timeout’ option in it’s menu to 360. This means it will count to 360 seconds of cursor inactivity before it considers me idle and stops counting. Since it instantly stops counting if you switch to ‘non-work’ a program, I figure this extra time just about cancels out relevant time that it ignores in ‘non-work’ programs by counting an extra minute or so when I walk away from the computer to grab some water or what-have-you.

3. Carapace

I use Carapace the least of these three, since my work doesn’t often have a need for creating perspective lines. But when there is architecture involved in something, this proves invaluable in simplifying that process.

Carapace lets you copy paste an image into it, and then drop in vanishing points and move them around to create perspective lines. (Though you’ll want to scale down your full res drawing or painting a bit to avoid lagging the program.) Like with PureRef, fighting the shortcuts is the worst part of it, though for myself it’s more of an issue in this program because I don’t use it often enough to remember them. Still, it gets the job done, and it’s easy to adjust the points to feel things out until you get them ‘right’. Then you just copy and paste the grid back into your art program and you’ve got that information to use as need be on its own layer.

Of course, using Carapace isn’t a replacement for actually knowing how perspective works– you still have to have a sense of how far apart the vanishing points should be placed to keep things feeling believable. But it sure does save you a lot of trouble once you do have that knowledge.

So, there are my big three recommendations for programs to help your art workflow. I hope people find them useful– if you do, please share so that they climb a little higher out of their unwarranted obscurity! And if you’ve got a favorite tool like this that I didn’t cover, feel free to share it in the comments. I know I’m curious to see what else is out there, too. Also, if Mac users have any suggestions for programs that fill similar functions, feel free to share there as well!

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