A couple years ago, I made a journal entry on DA when someone traced my art and me being rather irritated by it. I posted the artwork though I didn't release the artist's name since I don't want people to give them grief, but it was clear that I was kind of miffed by it.

It still continued to happen every so often, and today I received a again note on DA about someone tracing my work.

It was this piece:

Which was clearly a copy of this old work of mine (they even copied my signature placement, heh):

Now I actually find myself on a slightly different opinion regarding having people trace my stuff. I actually don't mind it anymore. I have a few reasons why and I'm not gonna state them all, but I just want to make the bottom line clear:

As long as you link to my DA and ALSO link to my original artwork, then I don't mind if you traced my work.

I'm not going to lie and say that I don't sometimes roll my eyes when I see someone trace Yarifeth's picture, change her hair color and call her someone else (hey, I'm only human, I can be a bit territorial too). But you know what, it's cool.

I had a friend in highschool who couldn't draw, so to make her pictures she traces different pictures from comic books and puts them together to make her desired picture. She's not passing it off as her work or passing herself off as a great artist. She just needed to find a way to see her own characters in action, in a real picture that she could see. And I guess that's what these people are doing. They just want to be able to actually SEE their character outside their head. And it makes them feel happy. They're not passing my work as theirs, they're not saying they're the mastermind behind the picture, and they're not trying to sell it, so... Yeah I guess I'm okay with it for the most part. There might be a situation that will come up later where I will not be okay with it, but as things are now, everything's cool.

Of course, if it's a commission, then out of respect for the person who paid for the artwork, I'm going to have to ask it to be taken down. But my personal work... Yeah, just credit me and link the original piece and we're cool.

Keep in mind though, that this are just my feelings on it personally. Other artists will have differing opinions on this. I'm not speaking for everyone!

And actually, I want to start collecting tracings of my work, so I think from now on, instead of reporting them on DA, I'm gonna fave them in a new folder So yeah, I still do appreciate people who let me know if they've found copies of my work on other galleries!