MT: I saw that Edgar Allen Poe stencil tutorial you posted recently. Would you consider creating more tutorials in the future? How do you feel knowing that other people could potentially creating your designs?



DC: I love the idea of artists making tutorials and walkthroughs, it’s always neat to see how someone made something. You could learn something new or it might click in your head to try something you hadn’t previously considered. I’m certainly considering making more tutorials, especially for the r/sticker community on reddit, that is a community that seems like it’s on the come up, and I like the positivity and encouragement I see on there.

I’ve actually had my designs “borrowed” before. Recently I found a guy on tumblr randomly who had art very similar to mine, and the more I looked into it I realized it wasn’t just similar it was pretty blatant, and as I looked back through the history of his tumblr there was a very obvious, very clear, shift in the design on the art that he had been making; about three months prior he had suddenly started basically ripping off my work. It was then that I realized that it was a same person who had started following me on Instagram three months before then. So it was obvious that he found my IG and start ripping off my work. So I wrote him, and was very civil, and told him his art was cool, I liked it, and that it almost looked like something I had come up with – I was very facetious. I thought to myself “I’ll never hear from that guy, he’ll probably just block me”, but to my surprise he actually wrote back and fessed up. He basically said “yeah you caught me, I really love your artwork and what you were doing is what I’ve been trying to do for so long and haven’t quite been able to make it work, so I thought I’d copy you and see if I could get my own thing started”, which I thought was cool. It was cool that he owned up to it and it was flattering that someone would thinking highly enough of my art to try to use it as a catalyst to ignite their own. He’s since shifted away from my stuff, and I hope he continues to refine his stuff.