#artist beware

professorbeesart:

This is a client caution/beware for any future artists in the north Texas area. I was a paint-for-hire for this gentleman for the past 3 years. I’ve painted about 200 toys and his earlier Instgram posts is full of paintings I’ve watercolored for him. After 3 years, I finally asked him to please credit my full name or social media tag (He deleted my attempts to tag myself) if he was going to post pictures of toys/paintings I had done. He always paid upfront, so no worries there. He claims he gives me credit, but only mentions me in passing conversations in his videos or only first name basis. The only 2 instances where he shared my phone number to potential clients was when they reached out to him asking about the paint job. He was pretty quick to cite his personal qualms as a reason to discredit my hard work. I told him I felt hurt and why (and then was met with the longer message). I was nothing but extremely professional with his work. In this small town, I was the only artist to bring him bulks of toys and paintings, never ghosted his texts, sat and listened to his plans for his comic stories, and I always asked questions if I was ever unsure of anything.

While it would be polite and good business to link to my site somewhere, without some form of TOS or a written agreement, there is no legal obligation to do so. This is in no way a call out to bother or harass this man because this post isn’t made for that point. My message is to learn from this. If you’re a young independent artist, get everything in writing before you do as big of a job as this. Take credit for your work because it really does matter. Our job as artists is to help each other grow, not build ourselves up by knocking others down. Though if you wanted to buy one of his toys and then post photos of it while also tagging me, that’d be absolutely fantastic. I don’t plan on working with him anymore, so the ones signed under my name would become very limited supply.

This is my third big blow out when it comes to high paying commissioners this year. I’m just getting so tired.

Please treat your artists kindly. We’re humans too.

Pigeon Comics, where have you been???

^^^^^^^^