Months ago I was contacted with the amazing opportunity to illustrate the contributors page of HOW Magazine - I've been a big fan of the magazine since design school and was thrilled! Well, the magazine is out now (January '11 issue) and I can't even start to explain how it feels to have my face on a page with these amazing people - it's a dream come true!
So it was brought to my attention over the weekend that someone stole my artwork (Thanks Jr Kishore Ramcharitar - see his portfolio here). I don't even know where to start on my rant about this. Obviously a true design/art professional would never steal artwork in this manner and I forget about the types of people that would - And now I have to protect myself against them - hopefully not by adding an ugly watermark over my artwork. The point is, I don't spend hours and hours of work on a poster just to have someone spend 15 minutes in Photoshop to create a poster for a radio contest with their name on it.
As far as I know this was just a Facebook based radio competition in Trinidad with Tariq Ali, the facebook name of the guy who blatantly stole my poster, winning tickets to a Maroon 5 show and unfortunately there isn't much I can do. The scary part is how much this happens without artists knowing... One interesting thing to note is one of the comments from the Facebook page - "he personalized it and made it his own.." I'm sorry, but there's nothing personalized about what he did - it's my artwork...
Amelia LeBarron
