A Weekend Getaway

We spent a long weekend at our family getaway near Atlanta, Michigan this past weekend, but before we left, I caught site of the scene above from my studio window. Five swans came out of the early morning mist, the sun shining on them like specters of the lake. They spotted me in the window and immediately swam over looking for a handout, which I know better than to provide.

After loading up and saying goodbye to the cats, we headed for Atlanta on another spectacular day of warm sunshine and fall colors. Saturday dawned sunny, warm and still so I took a walk around the pond with my camera and captured as much as I could for memories and paintings to come.

My parents-in-law bought this property in the 50's for hunting, but the family gathered here frequently over the years for holidays and snowmobiling, and eventually the folks retired here. We spent our honeymoon here and used to take long walks in the woods before kids, so it has a very special place in my heart.


When they first bought the property, this is the shack that the folks, my husband and his brother stayed in when they came up to plant and tend the hundreds of tiny pine trees that were planted on the bare hills. A pond was dug and stocked with fish, and not too many years later, a mobile home replaced the shack. It was added to over the years to accommodate the growing family of wives and grandchildren.


The years have since taken their toll on the old shack whose additions have now fallen down or caved in. It has a melancholy look now as if it holds memories of much better days and people whom we can only wonder about. Such abandoned shacks are pretty common around the northern Michigan woods, and one always wonders what stories they could tell about their former inhabitants. Now they are left to the skunks, raccoons and other wild creatures who find bits of shelter in their dilapidated ruins.

Remembering Bo

We are having absolutely spectacular fall weather here in northwest lower Michigan; warm, sunny days and cool nights which have brought out equally spectacular fall colors. We are nowhere near peak color yet, but it's a good color year with the brilliant oranges and reds of the maples contrasted against the dark evergreens and golden yellows of our beech trees and poplars. It's been a bumper year for beechnuts, so the squirrels are again busy bounding about in our yard gathering their harvest for the winter.

Thankfully, we have no apples, so that means no deer to browse on my perennials and shrubs. On the other hand, that also means no apples for us, which means I had to buy some for the first time in three years!

Unfortunately, I'm stuck in the house looking out while continuing to work on gathering financial information for our advisor guy; made all the more urgent by the financial crisis in our world. Ugh! I've been adding up our monthly expenses and wondering how everything got so much more expensive so quickly.

In spite of also nursing a sore throat and headache, I did manage to get outside yesterday to give my car a very overdue interior cleaning. I felt a little sad while doing it because I was washing the last of Bo's muddy paw prints off the back seat and vacuuming up his hairs from the cargo area. We lost him two years ago this month, and yes, it's been that long since the car had a good cleaning!


I still miss Bo. I remember the joy this small Lab mix pooch brought to the family for nearly 16 years after we rescued him on a freezing December night from a household that had banished him to the yard with no shelter from the cold and wind and very little human contact. We were just going to take a look at him that night in response to the ad in the paper, but when my husband saw the conditions he was living in; tied to a tree and shivering; there was no way he was going to let that dog spend another cold and miserable night in that place. Bo eagerly hopped in our car with not even a look back as our kids showered him with attention.

In the first 24 hours we had him, he had to be shoved out the door to go potty because he was so afraid that he couldn't come back in. We got him as a companion for our German Shepherd, and they bonded immediately. Bo thought he was in Heaven and showed us every day how grateful he was. He and Daisy became best friends and spent hours playing in the big dog yard until Daisy became too old and crippled to enjoy the rough housing.

Bo had a habit of tuning you out when his attention was focused on something. If he got loose, he would take off on a dead run out the gate and into the road. Most likely it was this propensity that caused him to end up a stray on the doorstep of the family that took him in, so one of his nicknames became Hobo Joe. More often we called him Bobo. We could never trust him to be on the loose, but around the house he wanted nothing more than to be at your side - or Daisy's.

Bo never did get over his dislike of the cold or isolation, and after Daisy died he became strictly an inside dog.

Well, now I've digressed. The two photos at the top are views from my studio. Our lake is quite narrow and long, and on a still morning like this one, the fall colors are reflected in the water, adding to the brilliance of the scene. I love the view from my studio window, and one of these days I'm going to paint it.

Speaking of the studio, poor Bard is languishing on the easel as I work on these financial figures. It will take two or three days in a row that I can dedicate to painting in order to finish him up, and so far I haven't been able to put them together. I'm determined to finish him by month's end, however.

Bard; Toning Down The Red

An email to my client did confirm that I'd gotten Bard a little too red. So, I let him dry a good long time and got back to work today.

My first attempt at correcting his color wasn't successful. Naples Yellow is too light. After wiping that off, I tried another mix of Yellow Ochre and Naples Yellow. I scumbled this mixture over his whole head and ears. It did tone down the red but also flattened the image, taking away some of the contrast, but since I need to paint another layer over this one to make some other corrections, that will be fixed later.

Then I decided that it would be best to scumble over the neck and shoulder with the redder mix so that the two areas would blend better. That worked out quite well, and now he no longer looks like a horse with a badly sunburned face! His color needs to be corrected further, and for that I think a trip to the barn, with canvas in hand, is in order. When I compare the painting to Bard "in the flesh", I will be better able to tell how to correct the color to get it to match more accurately.

Return of The Peppermint Kid

Now that the book work is again caught up, I'm getting back to work on Bard's portrait.

A few weeks ago, you may remember, that I painted the background in greens, blues and yellows. After living with it a while, I realized that the background color was too intense and was competing with the horse for attention. What to do?? Remembering that the way to dull down a color is to mix some of its opposite into it, I decided to use cadmium orange to do the job. The opposite of green on the color wheel is red, but I didn't want to turn the green any darker and thought that orange might be a good compromise. It worked like a charm! After painting Cad orange over the whole background, I took a rag and wiped off all but a very thin coating. Voila! The background was put in its place, and Bard was again the center of attention as he should be.

Yesterday I began the main layer of color on Bard and managed to finish his face except for his eye. Bard is a lighter sorrel than my horse, Scottie, and I tried not to get him too red since I knew that Scottie's color would be very much in my mind. Unfortunately, I think I did anyway. My husband had taken the laptop with him for the weekend, so I couldn't set it up next to the easel while I painted. Instead, I had to run back and forth between the big computer down the hall and the painting, looking for details and the correct color. Not the best of working situations by any means, so next time I'll print out a few of the photos to use at the easel if I don't have the laptop to use.

As usually happens to all us artists, today I can see several changes and corrections to be made, so after this layer of paint is dry enough, I'll go back and make all the corrections and make Bard's head less red by glazing some Naples Yellow over it. That should do the job.

In the meantime, you can see that his head now looks more substantial than the rest of him as the paint is built up. I'll move on to his neck and shoulder for now and hope I can match the two areas later.

Bard has been in the works for a very long time now, and I'm anxious to get him finished up and to his owner before another holiday rolls around.

On another subject, I cannot let this day go by without recalling that it was 19 years ago today that I bought Scottie, my second and most beloved horse. He was a dream come true and came along at just the right time in my life to help pull me out of a very dark time. I truly owe him my life, and he has brought untold happiness to me ever since.

Part III; Art Thieves Exposed!

Finally, we come to the last installment on copyright violators; the naming names part.

My encounters with art thieves have been varied.

The first happened a few years after I designed a logo for my husband's business. Amazingly, an unrelated business just down the road adopted the graphic portion of the logo and used it in promotional materials and a magazine ad for their business. The business and the magazine got a Cease and Desist letter from our attorney. No more ads appeared.

One of my images appeared on charms being sold on ebay. I submitted a Vero form.

A visitor at a horse expo told me that she had found another artist down in Ohio who had copied one of my images. Unfortunately she couldn't remember the artist's name.

A needlepoint dealer had taken one of my images (and one from an artist friend of mine) and turned it into a needlepoint pattern and was selling it. We notified her web host and then her. She removed it and promised to destroy the pattern. Amazingly, on her needlepoint blog, she makes a big deal out of not taking images without permission, so it's obvious that she knew better but didn't think she'd be caught.

Just last month, we found a website that was offering clip art horse images that included one of my images and another artist's. Before I could notify him, he removed my image and a few others. Obviously HE knew which images he didn't have the rights to.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled onto this artist's website who had copied one of my drawings. Notice that he even admits to having copied drawings from websites! As a musician, he should know better.

And, finally, there have been several encounters with kids. In the two cases below, they were exposed by others who recognized my artwork or recognized that the child had not done all that artwork herself. I figure that this negative exposure on the internet is a lesson learned that these kids won't forget. And, hopefully, it will wise up other kids to not do the same. Take a look;

Lauren Shelley Dreamer

Lauren Shelley Little Inspector

Youtube video Dreamer

You may wonder how we artists ever find our own work that's been stolen, given the vastness of the internet. Well, for one thing, the equine art community watches out for each other. Most of us are familiar with each other's work and notify each other if we find an image somewhere that we don't think it should be. We also have a formal online group that acts as a watchdog for equine artists and photographers, The Equine Arts Protection League. Many thieves have been exposed through member efforts, especially on ebay. I've also found several just by checking my stats and looking at the search results. The image search results are really helpful in turning up copies of my artwork, such as the pencilweb one above.

So far as I know, the Chinese haven't yet deemed any of my artwork attractive enough to copy. I don't know whether to be insulted by that or grateful. Grateful is probably the best choice for now.

Part II; Who Are These Art Thieves?

The image above was stolen and sold as a needlepoint pattern.

Art thieves on the internet come in several varieties. They range from petty thievery to outright art fraud crooks. At the lower end of the scale are the kids who post our artwork on websites, sometimes claiming it as their own and sometimes just displaying it with no credit given to the artist. Unfortunately, some of the websites that they post it on, such as Webshots, allow visitors to order prints of any images they find on the website. Thus they are taking income away from artists who may very well be selling prints of that same image.

The next tier of art thief is the older artist who ought to know better who copies our art and presents it as his/her own original art. But by far the bigger threat to artists' livelihoods come from those enterprising web mavins who steal our images and offer them on products on their own websites - or offer prints of them. Usually, the copyright notice (which most of us are forced to place on our artwork) is carefully and skillfully removed to protect the guilty. When caught, they usually claim that they found the art on a free clip art site or got it from someone else who said it was okay to use. Yeah, Right.

I happen to know about one such particularly brazen individual who was so blatant in stealing artwork and so defiant toward artists when she was caught that she is now being prosecuted by the federal government for fraud, among other things.

Ebay has become both the boon and the bane of many artists. It has become a favorite outlet of the top tier of art thieves; the Chinese art factories. They copy the artwork of other artists in assembly line fashion, reproducing hundreds of copies of the same painting. Then these copies are sold in the United States as originals to Walmart and other discount stores and at those "starving artist" sales in your local community. The "artists" are paid starving wages, all right; by our standards at least.

If you've ever bought a painting at one of those sales, you now know that you didn't help to support a starving local artist; you helped to support the Chinese government!

Next I'll share with you some of my own encounters with art thieves young and old.

Part I; A Primer On Copyrights

Something we artists battle continuously on the internet is the problem of people taking our images and using them for their own purposes. There seems to be this widespread belief that if an image is on the internet, it's copyright free. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Amazingly, this belief is held by artists as well as non artists!

Let me spell out the most important facts for everyone to understand about copyright law.

1. A WORK OF ART IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT FROM THE MOMENT OF CREATION.

2. THERE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE A COPYRIGHT NOTICE ON THE ARTWORK FOR IT TO BE PROTECTED.

3. THE ARTWORK DOES NOT HAVE TO BE REGISTERED WITH THE COPYRIGHT OFFICE TO BE PROTECTED.

4. THERE IS NO PERMISSIBLE PERCENTAGE OF AN ARTWORK THAT CAN BE COPIED WITHOUT INFRINGING ON THE ARTIST'S RIGHTS.

If you don't know anything else about copyright law, know these four facts.

How do these facts translate into everyday living?

They mean that my artwork is protected by copyright from the moment that I make a mark on a sheet of paper or canvas. If you want to paste my painting onto your website to decorate it, you have to ask my permission. If you want to copy my drawing, you have to ask permission, and you cannot claim that your copy is your own original work of art. It is not; it is a copy. If you want to use one of my note cards to decoupage onto a wooden box, you have to ask permission. If you want to use one of my paintings on t shirts and sell them, you must ask for a licensing contract for the right to do so. I will rent to you the right to use that image on specific merchandise for a specific period of time, and in return you will pay me a royalty for the right to do so.

There is a fifth point about copyright that is important to remember.

5. ALWAYS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT AN IMAGE IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT NO MATTER WHERE YOU FIND IT.

See numbers one and two above. The only works of art that are not protected by copyright are those that have fallen into the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

There are also misconceptions about what is the PUBLIC DOMAIN. It is NOT artwork that contains no copyright notice or signature. It is NOT artwork that appears on the internet. It is NOT artwork and photos that you find displayed in Facebook or MySpace or on Webshots or Smugmug or any other photo display site.

Artwork in the PUBLIC DOMAIN is artwork whose copyrights have expired or whose copyright holders have released it into the PUBLIC DOMAIN. You can assume these days that a copyright has expired only after the artist has been dead for 70 years. That would mean that any artist who died after 1938 would still have valid copyrights held by his or her heirs.

And finally, one last point to remember which has to do with your own copyrights.

6. COPYRIGHT APPLIES TO PERSONAL PHOTOS AND ARTWORK AS WELL AS PROFESSIONAL PHOTOS AND ARTWORK.

This means that all of your family photos that you post on the internet and all of your writings are also protected by copyright. No one else may use them or display them without your permission.

Be aware of your rights, and respect the rights of others. Ask permission!