Yesterday I came across the flyer for the Moseley Art Trail, which is part of Moseley Festival. I instantly recognised the image used for its style. It looked suspiciously like an image from a well-known digital illustrator. I examined the flyer and nowhere is there a signature or a note crediting the artist for their work. It could’ve been the work of one of the 35 artists and art groups mentioned on the flyer but I still find it strange that this wasn’t mentioned in writing. Once I got to a decent wifi connection I instantly checked artist’s website and there it was!
The original artwork is from Switzerland based artist Masha, aka Limkis on Deviantart.com. I’ve been following her artwork for the past few years and it’s heavily influenced some of my earlier work. You should check out her gallery!
I’m definitely not accusing the festival of stealing. Afterall, the artist made the original .ai file available for download without any conditions of usage, and they could’ve actually asked her for permission to use it. What I’m curious to know is why, out of the particiapting 35 Moseley/Birmingham based artists and art groups Moseley Festival chose to go with an image from an artist based in Switzerland to represent its local festival.
3 Responses to “Moseley Art Trail”
Hi Antonio,
Of course you are right well spotted this image is a free download from a vector graphics site on the internet – I commissioned the production of the posters and the flyers as I am a volunteer event organiser on the moseley festival committee and the art trail is my event for this year.
I think you have made a very important point that the artwork should perhaps be a design done by one of the participating artists and this is something I’d love to do for future events. This year unfortunately I had no sponsor therefore no budget to pay a designer and I also ran out of time for producing the flyer so this is the result of me and my boyfriend scouring the internet for an image to use and we liked this one and felt it represented the feel and my vision for the art trail.
In hindsight we should have credited the artist.
Thanks,
Lauren Davies
If the original artist made the work available online with no explicit license, under UK law the work has a status of ‘all rights reserved’, i.e. it is illegal to publish it or otherwise use it without the original artist providing a license to do so.
@Lauren
I do hope she is credited, could this information not be added to the website?
@Jamie
Thanks, I almost forgot about that!