#watermarks

I decided that this floral print was colourful enough to pretend to be a jelly roll LOL

So now to cut my 32 strips of floral and then the various background cuts out of the pastel polkadot.

REMEMBER TO MAKE SURE YOUR WATERMARK IS ACTUALLY LEGIBLE!

NO HATE to the user who made this original post on youtube btw, i love their videos! I just wanted to share because a lot of people repost and reupload your art wether you want that to happen or not, so making sure you have a watermark that’s hard to remove and EASY TO READ will be very helpful in making sure your uncredited work still has your name tied to it! This also helps with preventing people from being able to steal your work and pretend it’s their own.

Some helpful watermark/signature tips I’ve learned over the years:

- sign near the character’s face and then on other parts of the image you think are more likely to get screenshotted!

The face and the more detailed parts of your character or drawing or any other focus could be screenshotted alone or someone could try to crop out your signature to try and steal it. Signing all over the place helps with this! I personally have learned to sign in different colors along the lineart and shading of my pieces so the signatures aren’t jarring or out of place. If you also want a large signature that people can recognize, that’s also fantastic! Also note, please make sure your signature is LEGIBLE! Ask friends and family to make sure they can read it because otherwise it defeats the entire purpose 💔

- watermark your background

this kind of goes in hand with my first point, but if you’re putting tiny signatures all over your drawing, it might be hard to see them if someone isn’t looking. Someone might also just download the image and repost it by itself, and then people can still be easily fooled that it’s someone else’s art because they claimed it that way. For this, I plaster my tag all over the background or on top of it. I recommend using a thin rather than bold font and then messing around with masks and colors until it isn’t competing with the main image. Doing this with your backgrounds can also help make them look more complete, especially if you’re like me and tend to struggle from “what the fuck do I do with the background pattern” syndrome 💀

- add texture!

ADD TEXTURE! Add gradients everywhere, little details in the shading, add a noise filter or a different texture overlayed on top of each piece- make it really fucking difficult for someone to scrub your name off of your art! I’ve also heard that adding noise filters over your art can help mess up AI if/when people feed your art to them clankers.

I've said this several times before, but I suppose the time has come to say it again.

I watermark my photos because before I did so, people stole them and claimed them as their own work, their own discovery. I spend a lot of time hunting down uncommon photos, verifying the accuracy of the information accompanying them, and editing them for greater clarity. I don't want others using them without attribution.

no watermark

or watermark