And it frustrates me.

I keep waiting to see one of my photos used without my permission.

Once something hits the net its so hard to track the possibilities of its whereabouts. My advice, just keep doing it big, the biters never last in this game.

Extremely lame. Hope that guy gets what he deserves. (A thorough spanking perhaps?)

GC, I made two videos this week but Screenflow ate one and blanked a bit of another. Ugh.

Bradlee, bums indeed!

Jenn, bullshit AND bums. Definitely. Thanks for the scooting!

DSKZ, it turned out to be a youngin’. Things were resolved pretty quickly. Moreover, I am absolutely humbled by the amount of emails and well wishes offered. You guys rock!

I have a great set of peers and readers, that’s for sure.

http://fortressofortitude.wordpress.com/2008/06/07/beauty-and-the-beast/

Hope that makes you feel a bit better :D

Also, if you continue to post preliminary sketches and final art pieces, maybe you could down-rez them and put a watermark across them.

As for the theft itself, if someone wants to steal an idea, they will. It doesn’t matter whether they see it online, in a magazine, at the museum or on the TV. If they want, they’ll take it.

My advice is to write Shepard Fairy and Coop and ask them how they deal with imitators and thieves. I’m sure they’ve seen it all.

The same thing just happened to designer Von Glitschka where Imperial Toys jacked one of his tribal tattoo designs and included it as part of a sticker pack type thing.

the original post has been removed from his blog, but here’s this: http://artbackwash.blogspot.com/2008/05/creative-leftovers.html

He seems to mean business now. Anywho, maybe you can flip him an email for advice on how to stop stuff like this from happening in the future. I’m sure he’d be more than happy to give you decent outline for protecting your work.

on a side note, this is the first time i’ve ever left you a comment. i found your blog thru Drawn! and have been following your work ever since. your advice has really helped me out a ton.

i’m with d!, the guy that left a comment above. i say we find this sanchez dude and stomp him out.

John, at least the dude in question took everything down.

I started to soak in your thumbnails last night. Wicked ideas!

I am so glad that the plagiarized images are no longer visible

But Ray, don’t stop doin’ that voodoo you do! You have, single-handedly, renewed my excitement with Manga Studio and digital art creation through your videos and this blog. If it wasn’t for you, I feel the update to Manga Studio for the Mac wouldn’t have happened so quickly.

I’m so sorry that unprincipled scum bags stole a bit of your trust and generosity, rest assured, it will grow back. You have my thanks for all the sharing you have done and hope it will continue.

On the other hand, you don’t want somebody out there to be jacking your stuff and using it to expound upon even the slimmest opportunity of making money.

But, the way I see it is simple: it’s a piece of shit knock-off for a piece of shit line in a piece of shit part of a notoriously inconsistent industry. 2Crew? Rebel?

Call me jaded, but there’s a little claw inside me that tugs toward the ‘who gives a damn what shitty people do’ side of things. That said, you did the right thing by confronting them (assuming you did). Moving forward, however, don’t let kids like this change what you’re doing…you work hard, and you deserve to stay the course.

Remember: some people were given a face just so you could find them and step on it.

Good work, as always.

I assume the benefits that your open sharing of your work and thoughts have brought (and will continue to bring) to your career must far, far outweigh any *actual* damage a joker like this might cause you (as opposed to emotional harm – pissing you off, etc), so I’d urge you to keep doing what your original instincts told you was the right thing to do.

He claims to not know me or my work, despite having left several comments on my Flickr page and leaving me messages on the Emptees forum asking if I’d do branding work for him.

Lame.

Ah well, at least the work is down.

Everyone has a cracked copy of photoshop, a handful of zitfaced punk friends with no criticality, and now everyone is a “Designer.”

This is what this leads to. I hate to be elitist, but it’s a shame one of the kids “implicated” in this is entering design school in september.

he’s obviously representing the rest of us poorly.

is he in LA?

I guess what I’m saying is, if he has balls to this, he could have equally just stolen a finished piece by you that had already been passed on to your client.

Forgive me if that WAS what had happened. Perhaps I misread you and thought he stole an unfinished piece.

Please don’t stop your process based posts. It’s very educational. You should just watermark them and lie and say they are already given to clients, but continue to share with us the process behind the scenes.

Nevertheless, thank you for your work. I appreciate what you do.

And please, don’t stop the tutorials and examples, they are by far too valuable to a mass quantity of people. Thank’s for sharing and teaching Ray, please don’t let one lame ass individual screw it for the rest of us.