I have to know you first. Don’t just randomly add me because you feel like it. Note me on dA or here to see whether or not you can have my Skype. I like to keep my Skype private for good friends only. Otherwise it gets too cluttered with random people I don’t know and it gets noisy.
I have now gotten three of these in my askbox this week. People offering to sell my work and send the money back to me, with 10% “to charity”. One person offering to give out my URL as well so I can get “more exposure”.
I don’t know if this is an organized scam or what. At least one of the accounts doing this wasn’t a bot, because they apologized after I chewed them out for it. So:
If you get this in your askbox, tell them no. Tell them they should never sell artwork that isn’t their own, and they should never offer to. In fact, most conventions simply will not allow it, and they take that stuff seriously.
If you’re one of these people somehow got the idea that you can sell someone else’s art? You can’t. Don’t do it. Don’t even ask. It doesn’t matter who told you you could, or what charity you’re giving 10% to. The answer is and always must be NO.
No matter how hard you’ve tried, it seems like you’ll never be able to have the long, thick hair that it seems like it’s so easy for other people to get. Try out this tip and you’ll be amazed with the results.
Have you ever been listening to Rainymood and thought, “Yeah, this is good … but it would be nice if I could customize the sound more, or if there was a little more choice.
MyNoise is a customizable sounscape looper with so many options, even within each soundscape. So say, for instance, you really love rain sounds when you write or study or relax. Anything. I know I’m a big fan of rain sounds. They have a page for that.
But say you like really high, pattery rain, and LOTS of low thunder. Here’s where MyNoise really stands out: you can customize that. See those sliders with all the cute colors? That is your equalizer. You can adjust the levels based on what you want to hear more and less of. Here’s how it looks when you want high, pattery rain and low, rumbly thunder:
But say rain isn’t really your jam. Say you want something a little more ambient, a little more background noise-y. Something with people. Well, they have customizable coffee house chatter that even has the levels listed for things like “kitchen,” “babble,” and “table”:
Or say you miss the ocean.
Or say you miss your cat.
Or say you miss your spaceship.
Or say you miss the dungeon where you and your team of scalawag adventurers used to explore and face off against, say, dragons. In the dungeon.
This site is seriously so helpful, and those are just a fraction of every kind of sounscape the site has to offer. The best part is that if you want to layer it with music (for instance, I’ll layer a playlist + rain + coffee shop if the scene I’m writing takes place in a coffee shop), you can adjust the master volume, meaning all of your layers stay at their respective volumes, just louder or quieter.
Enjoy!
OH MY GOD
Weirdly enough I actually happen to be listening to this right now.
Friendly reminder to all working artists or (especially) aspiring artists.
If a client says they can’t afford to pay you but you’ll get good exposure, one of two things is happening:
1. They are lying. They can afford to pay you, but they are choosing not to. They will pay the printer to print the books, they will pay the mail service to deliver them, and you’d better believe they’re going to pay themselves for sending you an email explaining that they can’t afford to pay you. They think you are a sucker, and if you take the job you’ll be telling them they are right.
2. They are not lying. They have zero budget, no audience and no real distribution system. They’ll still be paying the printer and mail service because people who work in those professions don’t work for free just because someone promises them a recommendation. But they aren’t paying themselves, they’re running on an incredibly small margin, and there’s a good chance they won’t exist as a corporate entity in a few years. Publishing your work with them will give you less exposure than putting it on tumblr or Instagram for free would. It will never lead to a paying job.
If a client starts ranting about the “short-sightedness” of artists, or otherwise complains about artists in general in their opening offer to you, run. Run as fast as you would run if a blind date spent the whole of dinner ranting about how horrible your entire gender is. Yes, there are doubtlessly clients who’ve been screwed over by artists in the past, but the ones who complain about artists in general will not respect you, they will not treat you well.
Working for free does not prove that you are passionate about something. It proves that you do not need to be paid for your work. How many doctors went into medicine because they are passionate about saving lives? Do you think any of them are asked to perform heart surgery for free?
No one will ever pay $50 for something if they can get something similar for $5. When you charge next to nothing for art that you’ve worked for hours on, art that required years of training to create, you are telling your client that it is worth next to nothing. They will remember that the next time they want to hire an artist.
People who are looking to exploit artists know that artists are hard on themselves. They know that most artists don’t think their work is good enough to charge top dollar. They know that artists have been told from the first day they started taking their art seriously as a career that they’ll never make any money off it, that it’s not a real job, that it has no value to society. They know how to push artists’ insecurities about their profession in order to convince them that that demanding fair compensation is unrealistic and uncooperative.
If you’re just desperate for a job in the arts, any job in the arts, give yourself a job. Start a webcomic, or give yourself illustration assignments that you post on social media regularly, create work for a gallery show even if you don’t have one yet, or make a book. Give yourself a job. If you’re going to work for free, you may as well be working for yourself, setting your own hours and following your own interests. Having original art with original characters and ideas in your portfolio, and making sure your art is visible online will get the attention of publishers who are actually looking to hire people for good jobs. Drawing a shitty comic for a defunct publisher based on someone else’s shitty ideas will not.
Protect yourself, because no one else will. Protect yourself, because no one else will. There are people lining up around the block to exploit you. Protect yourself because no one else will.
“Rudimentary Creatures of Blood and Flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding.”
“Gem? A label created by your ancestors, to give voice to their extermination. In the end, what they chose to call us is irrelevant. We simply are.”
“Organic life is nothing but a genetic mutation, an accident. Your lives are measured in years and decades. You wither and die. We are eternal, the pinnacle of creation and existence. Before us, you, are nothing. Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything.”
“Your confidence is born of ignorance, the cycle cannot be broken. The pattern has been repeated more times than you could ever fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished.”
“My kind transcends your very understanding, we are each a God, Divine, free of all weakness. You cannot even grasp the nature of our existence. We have no beginning, we have no end, we are infinite. Billions of years after your kind has been eradicated and forgotten, we shall continue, as always.”
“We are legion, the time of our return has come. Our numbers will darken the sky of every world. You will not escape your doom, for we impose order on your kind. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we will it.”
“Your lives are as empty as your future. We are the vanguard of your destruction. This exchange is over.”
