Call me naive but I’ve never really taken watermarking of my work seriously. Yes I sometimes put my email address on an image if I’m posting it on a forum but other than those occasions I don’t bother.

But those of you who notice these things may have noticed that I’m adding more to the images on this site.

Plagiarism wasn’t something I thought I’d ever be concerned about but I should of taken the hint when I found a couple of guys claiming to be former employees of Ark. But then to find another freelancer with my work on his website claiming it as his own was a shock. I’d heard of it happening to other people but naturally it wouldn’t happen to me ..

His website has since vanished and the agency site I found him on have closed his account. I don’t know if he got any work off the back of mine and it would be particularly annoying if I found he’d beaten me to a  job with it.

Having checked my site stats I’ve noticed a lot of whole scale site ripping from 2 particular countries. This has got me a little concerned and while I’ve blocked all the IPs concerned I don’t know if its possible to stop it. People downloading and storing my work is fine. I’ve got drives full of other peoples work that I use for reference and study as I’d expect most artists do but ripping a whole site implies something else.

So I’m sorry to say that my images are going to have my big ugly email address all over them. Saving copyright info in the file is a waste of time as its easy to strip out so actually altering the image seems to be the best way to go for now. Sorry.