Friday, December 1, 2006

Art Thieves! A How to Spot One Tutorial.
Ok, I notice some people are absolutely clueless as to how art thieves work thier magic. Before you go and defend a potential thief, please, be the better person and bone up on these points first before you make an ass of yourself.

You wouldn't just jump in front of a cop and stop them from doing their duty, now would you? Then why in the hell would you stand in the way of an artist who just may have far more years of art experience than you do?

Does your total drawing experience add up to two or three years? Five? Ok, yawn, if so, then imagine how you would look trying to stack that against an artist who probably held a pencil longer than you were alive? Basically, don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Stay outta the way if you don't know what the heck you're getting in to.

There is a check list that I use right away to spot a fraud from the real deal. Once I recognize the 'signs' art thieves tend to follow, they become really easy to spot. This essay was heavely inspired by another DeviantArtists' journal on how to spot an art thief. Some are borrowed from his list and I added some more of my own here. It can be found right here. It's a good and fun read which you should go there first, then come back here.

Ok, prepared to be skooled on art thieves...

1) Consistency

Good and bad artists have a subconscious visual thumb print to thier work. Don't judge or fawn at an artist only after viewing just the first piece you see. Visit their gallery and then ask these questions:

-Is there a consistency in how their characters look? A thieves gallery will look something like a Deviants 'Favorites' section. Subjects and themes that are all over the place.

-Does the work progressively get better with every new submission or does it look like a rollercoaster of god like effort to worthless pieces of crap and back again? Unless they state that it's older work.

-Are the ink lines steady and effortless in one piece and pure chicken scratch in another?

-Are they very good with watercolors but suck ass at Photoshop?

2) Knowledge of Mediums

If the artist's gallery consists of mostly digital works and you ask them what type of tablet they use and thier responce is, "Tylenol." Probably a thief.

Thier favorite paint program is Photobucket. True story. Probably a thief.

They don't know pixels from vectors. Even trying to pass off a traditional hand painted work as being digital. Trying to pass of MS paint as being 'Photoshopped.' Probably. A. Thief.

3) Descriptions of Art

Most good artists that I frequently visit are often willing to share what went into the work. Relenquishing information about the type of material that were used. How many hours it took to make. What inspired them to make it. Where the work was published or going to be published. Thier art are like thier children and people love to share them with you.

Thieves, on the other hand, either tend to leave no information, leave only one sentence, the description reads nothing like what the image is showing or never implies they even did the work.

Do they only leave short descriptions like, "I like this one a lot"? Or, "I love this character"? Or, "Don't steal"?

Another, for instance, is a background character which is a rodent and they call it a mouse when to everyone else it obviously looks like a squirrel. True story.

Or they overexaggerate thier descriptions. Example, it took them seven months, or some unrealistic time fame, to work on the piece when it really looked like it would take a good artist four to three hours to produce.

4) The Images

There are quite a few signs within the images themselves that may send up red flags.

-Images size is too small. They look like they were originally thumbnail versions of the actual image thay they maybe grabbed off Google Image.

-Different signatures. The thief may not know thier way around a paint program or don't own one to be able to crop out the previous owners signature. Do some of the images have signatures that aren't even the same name as the thief's or the rest of thier gallery?

-Editing. Are there suspicious looking colors or vacant spots that look like it don't belong in the work. It is probably an attempt to cover an existing signature. Or the work looks like it were cropped too much off of the top, bottom or the sides which could have also contained information about the real artist.

-No exisiting preliminary work. Are every single piece in thier gallery finished works? They have problems posting or producing sketches, thumbnails, or progression of works in the gallery?

5) The Artist

How art thiefs conduct themselves can send up huge red flags as well. Are they too quite? Do they answer questions improperly? Do they avoid important questions? Are they extreemly defensive? Do they constantly resort to name calling? Do they skirt the issue at hand? Do they make a lot of excuses? Refuses and makes excuses why they cannot produce preliminary sketches or more work that would obviously put them in the clear? Do they cloud thier work history? Just things that look like they are dodging the truth.

This is about all I can think of. If you think of more, please, I wouldn't mind updating this list.

If you believe you have spotted a thief- do not accuse them of it! Thieves are an attention deprived lot, why else would they be doing it, and they would rather go down in a glory of flames and wreckage than admit they stole artwork. It'll result in a huge flame war which will eventually get you banned.

It's unfair, I know, but you have time on your side. Nothing makes your case look better than producing a list of evidence to stack against them. Links to the work in question, getting the actual artist to confront thier thief, and so on.

Find support groups to back you up because thieves, if they've been around the site for a while, will undoubtably have hords of uneducated and dedicated fans that will blindly defend them to the very end out of denial because thier now once cherished artist is nothing but a talentless hack who lied to thier unsuspecting faces.
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