HOME | DD

Description
Hey everybody, just an update and then some info I hope can help out some fellow artists. First up if you haven't seen, my little pinup series "Final FanTEAsy" is complete! 15 pin-ups for your viewing pleasure. If you enjoyed em or just wanna support the artist, I'm gonna be offering them in a digital art book on March 1st. I'll announce when that goes live, and you can see all the pin ups here in my gallery at low-res for free. xavierscribbles.deviantart.com…

That goes right into my next point. Notice I said you can view them at "low-res". Going forward when I save my art out in Photoshop I save it as a low quality JPG for the web. This is to curb art theft before it becomes a problem for me personally. Lately I've been seeing more cases of more popular artists work being stolen and sold on shirts or mugs or whatever else. Or even art being stolen and just claimed as someone elses. I know I'm not the most popular artist but this is something I will not tolerate. Plus when you think about it, theres NO reason for me to be uploading 4000x4000px final works online at 300ppi >__>;;. Thats just dumb. So I'm getting in the habit of stopping that.

It's my belief that this makes things like prints and digital art collections much more valuable. If someone could go into my gallery and just save out Hi-res versions of all the pinups for example there would no incentive to support the artist. It just puts me in more control of my artwork and I don't ever think that's a bad thing. Especially with these art thieves all over the place -___-;

If you use Photoshop and want to do the same as me. Follow these tips.

*Keep your original PSD versions saved separately. I have a Google Drive I just for just my art, and all my original art files are backed up there and in an external hard drive as well.

*Save Web versions of your art somewhere else. I use a simple folder called "WEB _____" The "____" being whatever month it is

*When you go to save for the web DON'T use "Save As" or "Save for Web" what you're gonna wanna use is "Export As", pictured here:

*You'll get a screen like what's pictured below. From there you can control everything about the image. The really important thing is to save it as a JPG (unless you need transparency) and to lower the quality slider to around 50%.

*Something I do is only save images with a width of 600px. I'm getting in the habit of never going bigger than that.

*What this does is not make your art impossible to steal, but sort of undesirable to steal. All the thief would get is a low-res 600 x whatever image that they couldn't really do anything with. It's way too small and too pixelated to print on anything like a T-Shirt.

*Dont sweat the Metadata boxes, its not really important for what we're trying to do.

*If you're not a PS user there are probably similar settings in your program, just do some digging.

Let me try to show the difference. Here I've got the original Hi-res file for Lightning side by side with the one for web. The original looks really sharp and is only at 25%, while the web version is small enough (600px wide) that the whole thing fits in the Photoshop window.

So, if you were to zoom these in equally the difference is clear.

In the JPG a lot of the details are lost when blown up to a "useable" size. Most art thieves would just be like "Hey this looks like shit" and move on to something easier to steal.

____

I hope this helps someone and thanks again to everyone who watches me or follows me on any of my social media and if you have any questions or feedback post a comment below!

:) (Smile) — Description
Hey everybody, just an update and then some info I hope can help out some fellow artists. First up if you haven't seen, my little pinup series "Final FanTEAsy" is complete! 15 pin-ups for your viewing pleasure. If you enjoyed em or just wanna support the artist, I'm gonna be offering them in a digital art book on March 1st. I'll announce when that goes live, and you can see all the pin ups here in my gallery at low-res for free. xavierscribbles.deviantart.com…

That goes right into my next point. Notice I said you can view them at "low-res". Going forward when I save my art out in Photoshop I save it as a low quality JPG for the web. This is to curb art theft before it becomes a problem for me personally. Lately I've been seeing more cases of more popular artists work being stolen and sold on shirts or mugs or whatever else. Or even art being stolen and just claimed as someone elses. I know I'm not the most popular artist but this is something I will not tolerate. Plus when you think about it, theres NO reason for me to be uploading 4000x4000px final works online at 300ppi >__>;;. Thats just dumb. So I'm getting in the habit of stopping that.

It's my belief that this makes things like prints and digital art collections much more valuable. If someone could go into my gallery and just save out Hi-res versions of all the pinups for example there would no incentive to support the artist. It just puts me in more control of my artwork and I don't ever think that's a bad thing. Especially with these art thieves all over the place -___-;

If you use Photoshop and want to do the same as me. Follow these tips.

*Keep your original PSD versions saved separately. I have a Google Drive I just for just my art, and all my original art files are backed up there and in an external hard drive as well.

*Save Web versions of your art somewhere else. I use a simple folder called "WEB _____" The "____" being whatever month it is

*When you go to save for the web DON'T use "Save As" or "Save for Web" what you're gonna wanna use is "Export As", pictured here:

*You'll get a screen like what's pictured below. From there you can control everything about the image. The really important thing is to save it as a JPG (unless you need transparency) and to lower the quality slider to around 50%.

*Something I do is only save images with a width of 600px. I'm getting in the habit of never going bigger than that.

*What this does is not make your art impossible to steal, but sort of undesirable to steal. All the thief would get is a low-res 600 x whatever image that they couldn't really do anything with. It's way too small and too pixelated to print on anything like a T-Shirt.

*Dont sweat the Metadata boxes, its not really important for what we're trying to do.

*If you're not a PS user there are probably similar settings in your program, just do some digging.

Let me try to show the difference. Here I've got the original Hi-res file for Lightning side by side with the one for web. The original looks really sharp and is only at 25%, while the web version is small enough (600px wide) that the whole thing fits in the Photoshop window.

So, if you were to zoom these in equally the difference is clear.

In the JPG a lot of the details are lost when blown up to a "useable" size. Most art thieves would just be like "Hey this looks like shit" and move on to something easier to steal.

____

I hope this helps someone and thanks again to everyone who watches me or follows me on any of my social media and if you have any questions or feedback post a comment below!