The Studio

Yesterday I discovered that an image that I had been given permission to paint in one of our kid’s classes was not the artist’s image at all.  It was not original to them.  Oh, they had painted it but had apparently copied another artist’s  original image.  Therefore it wasn’t their permission to give to the young artists to paint.  Instead of accepting their word I should have spent more time checking it.  I didn’t.  My fault.

As soon as you create something you have copyright to it.  You can’t copyright an idea but once you paint that idea, the copyright is yours.  In the digital age it is increasingly difficult to protect copyright.  There was a time you could ask someone for permission to paint from their image and they would either say yes or no.  Now you have to ask yourself, do you trust this source?  Is it their original image at all? Is the permission they are giving you really theirs to give?

I have apologized several times to the artist who created the original painting and have removed the image from my blog and destroyed the demo that I painted.  I’m not sure they cared how it happened.  They are just angry that it did, as they should be.  But now I have learned another valuable lesson about copyright.  Be extra sure you TRUST the source of the material if you are painting from someones image and not your own.   And in next week’s classes we will discuss copyright again.  It’s never to early to help students understand it.  And I will apologize to them as well.