Fan artist used as free prototype artist.
Attention Plush fan artist that enjoy making popular highly sought after characters. The Chinese Bootleggers have moved into eyeballing and replicating freelance plush artist/hobbyist highly sought after plushies for mass production. They are basically using you for as a free prototype artist.
If this is something concerning to you as an artist, I think our only option is to limit how much detail we give away in our photos of our plushies. Keep in mind this is mostly for popular characters with a lack of merchandise as well as not that good of merchandise. Since this is overseas and fan art there is not that much we can do, but maybe being more creative with our few photos of our plushies should limit this trend.
The Plushies featured here was made by . Myself http://hollyivydesigns.deviantart.com/ and http://sewbro.tumblr.com/
This is VERY serious guys. Like who the fuck thought they just steal plush patterns right under our noses?!
This has been going on for a while with other fandoms too. I’m not sure if it’s the same for these Undertale designs, but with the Pokemon and My Little Pony bootlegs out there, part of the problem is that the sites that are involved in making them take “suggestions” for what characters to make, and people give them pictures of fan made plush and ask them to replicate them (and often get pissy with the original artists when they don’t approve). The factories are entirely at fault, but so are the people providing pictures of fan made work.
I’m not entirely sure if it’s true, but I did hear at one point that they won’t accept pictures with deviantart’s watermark on them.
Either way, if this is what’s happening here, PLEASE DON’T PROVIDE THESE COMPANIES WITH PICTURES OF HAND MADE WORK.
They took some photos of a pony plush I made a while back and had them on their site saying they would make it. They did pull the images when I told them to delete em off their site, but who knows if they still copied it or not.
Just put your watermark on everything, it might not stop them from copying but at least it might deter them or show people who originally made the plush.
Here’s my contribution.
My goat, what have they done to you?!?!
