Copyright laws for artists what do you need to know?
How to create artwork? Is there a right way? is there a wrong way? who helps you along the way? Well in today’s video I am going to show you what happened to me and what inspired me to start creating more art because I’ve always had an itch to create art and now I’m sharing this journey with you so in today’s video I am going to cover two misconceptions and I’m going to talk about the level of expertise required in order to create a successful piece of art and whether or not you can collaborate with somebody and still call it your own piece of art so stay tuned.
1. What level of expertise is required?
In order for you to create your first piece of artwork or your third or fourth or fifth piece so when I created my artwork I didn’t have an intention to you know go out and sell it but like I’ve said in lots of my other videos nobody starts off as an expert right everybody started somewhere there is progress to be made there are lessons to be learned and you cannot learn any of these lessons or you cannot have an upward trajectory if you don’t ever try.
So by getting your feet wet by making mistakes or by having you know successes by accident you are going to learn what works and what doesn’t work you are going to learn what is an accurate representation of the type of art you want to create so asking what level of expertise is required to create art is sort of like asking a business owner what kind of experience do you have to have in order to start a business
Well some people start without knowing anything, they don’t have anyone in their family who has ever been an artist or a business owner so they don’t really know where to start except to maybe start watching videos or to start molding that clay or to start picking up a paintbrush and putting it to Canvas so there is no right or wrong way when you’re starting and when you’re learning I think it’s all about understanding what type of art speaks to you maybe one day you’re in a mood to take a really cool photograph or by accident you picked up your camera and took a picture of something really fascinating we’ve all seen videos and images of child prodigies who you know pick up a paintbrush and they’re able to make a self-portrait that looks more realistic than anything you’ve ever seen there are also artists so skilled at picking up a camera and taking something so innocuous or boring and making it come to life through photography.
so sometimes it’s easy to be intimidated and think this is the Raw wrong arena for me because I’ve never done it before everyone else is more skilled than I am and you get imposter syndrome but but I think that is absolutely normal it happens in every single industry whether you’re a lawyer, doctor, dentist, artist, sculptor, painter, singer, performer so please do not be scared if this is your passion and this is why I want you to read this blogpost until the very end because I have a very great example what you wanted it to look like I thought you had to actually be Hands-On well paint but what is that true do you have to? yeah so that’s a good question
My name is greetings everybody out there it’s cloudy out right here and uh we work on pieces together so you know we were talking about our carvings that we worked on and I personally do a lot of the grunt work right I do like some of the sawing and the chain sawing and the chiseling with the hammer and the stuff that’s kind of more labor intensive and after all that’s done it was uh I’m kind of a little bit tired you know even mentally psychologically from working the piece that Claudia’s got this fresh mind and and she becomes inspired by the shape that it’s taken so she’ll come in and she’ll start to do the details and all of the refinings and so in that sense it’s collaborative and I think that a lot of artwork like you had said it takes a lot of hands it takes a lot of Minds to come together to make certain things right like it’s like that saying that goes Taj Mahal wasn’t built in the day kind of thing and it takes a lot of people to come together to make a beautiful sacred Temple right or or like some of our artworks are just that
So I think that it’s really important because I think the point is we want to dispel the notion that an art piece has to be created by one person alone from A to Z so if you’re an artist out there or you’re a Creator and you’re thinking of an idea and you think you have to be the only one don’t pigeonhole yourself and know that it’s okay to collaborate with other people to manifest the finished product because to speak to his point it is a group effort and it it does take a village
um so it’s okay and don’t become insecure because you’ve got help from other people it’s okay to collaborate we we collaborate on a lot of different things that we make and do it together and I think sometimes you know things will be presented as coming from one or the other or sometimes together and it’s just it’s just natural and also I think really important to um open the creative process and the also the physical making processities so in continuing to watch this video you will see that in my conversation with one of the other artists they reaffirmed that you have to shed this insecurity because everybody has it so without having had this conversation I’m not so sure that I would have felt as confident moving forward but I’m here to let you know that even other artists that are honest carrying open and conversational will share their thoughts which tend to be similar so number two is it okay to collaborate with other people and still call it your own artwork so I think the answer to this question depends on how exactly these other people helped you did you have the entire Creative Vision for this artistic project and and then did you subcontract the jobs to help you bring your vision to life or was it that each and every person also contributed a creative idea because now we’re invoking copyright issues and as we know as a trademark and copyright lawyer it was really important for me to understand where other artists
are in this it was really important for me to be clear on where I should be giving credit to people um because I don’t want to make any mistakes and give myself 100 credit and so in my situation I had control 100 of the creative output in other words what it was going to look like how it should look how you know what colors should go where um and the materials we were going to use but if somebody helped me assemble it I want to know should I be giving them credit so here I am giving credit to the people who helped me assemble it thank you Tim um and you know so I think that’s subcontracting the help is a little bit different than when you have partners that are helping you create a song for example so if four people are working on a song Some people include some Melodies other person gives you the harmony somebody else gives you the lyrics that’s you know all a part of the the pie so you want to make sure that you’re giving those people copyright credit because they contributed to the copyrighted work which is a little bit different than just subcontracting out how to put the artwork together and I hope that makes sense because that is really important to copyright issues in different types of artwork moving forward so like I said I had some really important conversations and I apologize in advance for the audio quality um there was some background noise but please listen as closely as you can because the take-home points were very very important so Jackie and I were having a conversation earlier and um she mentioned to me that she was asking me whether or not I do this regularly and create pieces regularly and I said no not really and she said well that’s nice that you participated in this event not knowing if there was a reward involved and that you just did it for because you love artists and so I kind of want her to expand on on that point so here she is
treat me as to why how do you even know about me like true and typically when people do something
so I was really interested into it [Music] so I think that this is a lesson for anybody who’s thinking of creating something just just put yourself out there if you already have a day job great you don’t have to quit your day job um it could be your hobby until it becomes your career but at least put yourself out there because you have people like her who help you shed your insecurity and allow you to find out that that your art is welcomed by a larger community and you never would have known if you never tried so the point I think is to try yes and just do what feels uh natural here um you know I didn’t do this because I thought I was gonna accelerate her because I I just did it because I had this idea and I wanted to see it come to life and I love art so I have her to thank for kind of helping me show that insecurity I think sharing your talent with us thank you and if you’re an artisan you’re somebody who’s learning how to become an artist or how to put artwork together these are golden nuggets that you can take with you for the rest of your artistic Journey to learn more about copyright law don’t forget to catch this video right here because it is a great follow-up to this video so you can learn more about the intricacies of copyright law and how it applies to your own artwork