If there is one thing i’ve learned over my years being an artist on the internet is that i should ALWAYS sign my work.

Back when i started putting my art online more frequently (2009) i had this stupid tendency not to sign any of my works. and that was me just being sort of foolish and lazy, and thinking that certain things didn’t really require signing because i saw it nothing more than a mere doodle or a study. Till this day i still have this shit tendency not to sign work, and thats just simply carelesness . And that’s normal, right? i’m not a very popular or well known artist and i felt as if i had nothing to worry about, really. i guess that train of thought blew up in my face when it was brought to my attention last year that one drawing i made, A silly MS paint doodle of internet rapper Yung Lean, went viral. And has become a significantly popular image amongst the sad boys/yung lean fanbase. Even though i never caught on to it. And because of that was never credited, and in that regard kind of fucked myself over.

But let’s give this a little more context. Back in 2013, probably some shitty august afternoon, i was studying for some redos on my finals. Out of mere boredom with studying i decided to fuck around in MS paint. At the time, Yung Lean was starting to gain more attention, and had around that time released his first debut album on Mishka: Unknown Death 2002. sufficed to say I was really into it. So, after babbling to a friend on skype a little he just suggested maybe i should doodle Yung Lean. I thought that was a great idea, and the rest is history. But i didn’t view it as nothing more than a simple piece of fan art and a product of boredom. It was just a fun little doodle, nothing more, nothing less. My friend sent it to yung lean his Tumblr, and sufficed to say he liked it, so much even that he didn’t reblog it from the source, but simply ripped the image from my tumblr, and put it on his own. Now, i wasn’t too upset about this fact. I mean it was cool he put it up, but i wasn’t really cool with the fact he didn’t reblog it or credit me. Eventually my friend got back to him and said to add a source. Yung lean did edit the post and linked my then tumblr URL, but the problem is that i had recently changed it, so whenever anybody clicked on it it would refer to a dead page. Either way, I didn’t make a fuss about it and just left it be. i thought it was just gonna get a bunch of notes, and thats it.

Man, i couldn’t be more wrong.

Fast forward to september 2015, I was in London putting together an art show and hanging out with my pals (shoutouts to Amber, Solomon, Al, Ellen, A Young and Georgia). One day i was at my boy Sol and we were talking about probably something related to Yung Lean. I mentioned the drawing i did and how i had seen it around on message boards and tumblr, but didn’t think anything more of it. But, out of curiosity we decided to reverse search the otherwise silly doodle i had made, and to my surprise, it had spawned a life of it’s own; being used on countless blogs, message boards, websites and, to my dismay, online retailers using the image on merchandising. Considering i didn’t check up on the image in little over 2 years at that point.

So i made a cheeky tweet to RedBubble telling on one of what i hate to assume are still many users who were using the image for personal gain.

I was surprised, but also had the dreaded realisation about how this image was pretty popular, but i didn’t claim it. I was a fool not to have signed it, but can you blame me? i saw it nothing more than a mere product of procrastination at a time that i was just really into Yung Lean’s music. and i wasn’t expecting it to have become such a popular image of the artist itself. i realised i had shot myself in the foot, and that it was too late for damage control. So the only thing i could really do was just let it go. It had slipped into the public domain unbeknownst to me, and that is something that has been sort of haunting me ever since i found out. But after thinking about it for a long time, and also having friends who kept reminding me of it being out there i decided to write this post.

but, even though in the face of what i would consider a massive fuckup for not signing my initials, let me say this, i feel sort of humbled by the fact that a lot of people like and share this image. Whether they like it merely because of it’s link with Yung Lean or they like it because of the effort put into it or the style, whatever the reason. It’s nice to know that people like the image and that regard, and that it has become an image that is often linked with the artist. But just to remind you: To me it was nothing more than a doodle.

Also i want to here by call out the people who put the image on their merchandising. Kind of weak you didn’t bother to look up my deviantART or tumblr page. But i guess where there is demand there has to be someone who supplies it. But it’s not cool you didn’t do the effort to just look up the source of where this image came from. Or just generally just taking images off of the internet to sell on your shitty redbubble to make a quick buck off mere hype. And this doesn’t only apply to my piece. Many images (including but not limited to images from major clothing brands like Supreme, Music groups like Boy Better Know and even Yung Lean/sadboys or other visual artists like OBEY or KAWS, just to name a few.) have been ripped and for a lack of a more softer term, fucking stolen.

So there you have it, at least i got to clear my head on it if anything. No hard feelings to Yung Lean or people who have used the image (except for the people who are capitalising on it, eat a dick. and thats as far as i’ll probably take it.). and to artists reading this, always sign your work, because you never know some silly drawing you made is making waves somewhere on this vast hellscape known as the internet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯