Hands off Internet Thieves

You might have noticed that for the past couple of months, all the paintings I've posted on my blog have had a watermark of sorts on them, and there's a reason for that.  Back in February my best friend called me.

"Are you making coasters with your watercolor images now?"

"No."

"Well, somebody is."

"Say what now?"

Sure enough, a quick search on Etsy led me to a set of coasters for sale featuring one of my paintings.  You can picture me in front of my computer screen reacting like this

Thank you tumblr.com for providing the perfect gif to express my true feelings.

Y'all.

I was SO mad.

I fired off an email that was way more polite than I actually felt, and the listing for the coasters quickly came down though I never officially heard back from this person.  A simple "I'm sorry" would have gone a long way with me, but whatever.

This was actually not the first time someone has tried to use of my images for their own thing.  I've politely asked Facebook pages to credit my work, thwarted off someone who thought they could just make T-shirts from one of my art prints (?!), and intercepted and attempt by someone to make their own graduation invitations out of one of my online images.

Each time I put off adding watermarks to my paintings online.  It was just hard to bring myself to put a big giant X across each of my lovingly painted pieces.  But after I found one of those dear lovelies had been kidnapped, tortured, and turned into a coaster, I decided the X wasn't so bad.

It's going to be a long process to take each of my previously uploaded images down, add the mark, and re-upload, but everything new added to my site will be watermarked.  I hope you don't find it too terribly annoying. 

And if you ever see someone wearing a T-shirt with one of my paintings on the back, holla at cha' girl.  Cuz heads are gonna roll.