Hey hows it going?

This week I had one of my Instagram buddies reach out to me to say she wants to share her work online but is worried about getting work stolen. Here is some advice that might help.

1 Scaling Down For social media and website use, your image doesn't need to be big, in fact the expected standard image size is 72dpi. A print would generally be 300dpi at least in order for the quality to be good enough, so by reducing your photo size it will mean people can't make prints from your work as easily. If in future you want to work with magazines or for blogs, 72dpi is what everyone expects, so it pays to have your print quality copy (300dpi) and your 72dpi media suitable copy.

2 Watermark If you are really worried about your work you can add a logo or watermark in a prominent place on your image or some light patterning over the top of the image to stop people copying it. Try using Canva for this as it is free to use for the basic suite of tools and you can easily overlay text and images before re-uploading your image.

3 Talk to your providers For me using Wix as a website provider, they already compress all my images down to 72dpi. Also for print on demand shops like Redbubble they come with a watermark built in. I didn't know this at first and thought I would have to re-edit every single photo. So get in touch with your service provider to see what they have in place already, it could save a lot of time and effort!

Lastly bear in mind that there a millions of artists out there and hopefully you will be lucky and it will never happen to you. At least don't let the fear of copyright prevent you from sharing your work or processes...nobody can ever be exactly like you!

Good luck and let me know how you get on! Tag me in your posts @plantbasedpaintings and I will happily share your work in my stories so you can get seen by my audience too.

All the love,

Kat Xx

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