Something a bit different from me for a change, a digital painting of a fairly normal view. In fact this is one part of a view from my bedroom window that I've looked out over for the last thirteen years. I've often sat on my bed in the morning and looked out over the distant housing estate and slowly become entranced by the shapes and colours that make up the visual. Even the most humdrum scene can hold its own kind of beauty I suppose. I wanted to do a study of these blocks and keep it fairly simple. Around 80% of the painting was created in Adobe Illustrator and then brought into Photoshop to add some texturing and highlighting. Even though it's a straightforward looking scene I'm pretty happy with it, especially the illusion the shapes play on your eye when it is seen at a much smaller size hopefully making you think it's a photograph more than a painting, with your brain filling in the extra detailing. I hope anyway.
You may or may not have noticed that I've stuck a copyright line on this work, something that you will probably be seeing a lot more of in times to come. A recent legislation, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act, has effectively taken the rights of the person who created a piece of work and handed it over to the public domain. Effectively anything that has appeared on the internet, including your own family snaps on Facebook, could be open for the financial gain of others. Plenty of other people can explain this legislation better than I can, please click on the links for further reading, but the bare bones of it is that anyone can in the future see a picture you posted at any time and having attempted to find the creator of the picture and failed can then use the item in any way they deem fit, including selling the image on as their own. This might seem a difficult thing to prove right away, take the painting I've posted above, it's hardly been on the net, my name is plastered on it but who is to say in thirty years time when I've forgotten all about it that someone just doesn't discover it for the first time, copies the file, replaces the data embedded onto it, crops of my copyright line and sells it for their own use? Anything I create belongs to me and in the future my family. The ownership and rights of the works anyone creates should stay in their hands. Please go sign the petition below if you'd like to see the stop of legalised theft of copyrighted works.
At the moment my copyright line is fairly small and really such a slight deterrence to those who would wish to steal my work. Do we want to get to the position where a whole image is ruined by a massive watermark placed over it? Do we want to go down the route where websites like Scotch Corner don't exist because anyone can steal our work?
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