valster73

--> Artwork by @just.drawing.words & @valster73. Do not use without permission. I think it’s safe to say that I’m not the only one who misses the old Instagram days, when you could just go to Instagram and scroll down to your heart's content and see the posts of all the people you follow, with no algorithm telling you what you should or should not see; where we had the freedom to make our own judgment on what we wanted to see and not, without having to spend so much time choosing and engaging just so that these posts of the people we follow keep appearing in our feeds. So when I saw this campaign/initiative by Matthieu Tarrin (IG @tarwane ) and James Lewis (IG @jamesllewis ) about making Instagram great again, I knew I wanted to participate too. Part of the challenge of this campaign was to collaborate with another creative person, so when Sonia from @just.drawing.words and @soniaydesigns approached me to do a collaboration with her for this, I was more th...

Hi! Let me first start by saying thank you to everyone who has shown love and support for this campaign #inspirationvsimitation. So many of you have shared my recent blog post “ An Open Letter To The Girl Who Sent Me a DM ” on Instagram. It warms my heart to know that this spoke to a lot of people, and I love in particularly how some of the newbies in lettering have found the article helpful. The goal has always been to help others and to encourage people to do better. Now, it has come to my attention that there are artists out there who are completely okay with people copying their favorite artist’s work, or any work for that matter. Some even encourages it. I believe this causes a bit of confusion for some people, if not a lot. So you may ask, “What are we supposed to do then? Is it okay to copy or not?” If you’ve read my previous blog post than you’d know that I do not recommend copying people’s artwork. I personally suggest that you focus on copying techniques and th...

--> Photo and artwork by @valster73. Do not use without permission. Q: Can we copy and post on Instagram and then tag them (the artist) saying we were inspired? Because I’m a beginner and I just want to be consistent with my practice. I copied your work too but didn’t post it on Instagram yet. I want to show off that I can paint like you, and of course tag you that I’m inspired by you. Can I do that? Today I woke up to this question in my DM from someone who saw my IG story about asking permission if you want to copy someone’s work. There was no short answer to that question and even though I have already given the person an answer, I thought that I'd share my answer here too on the blog for others to learn. ---------------------------------------------- Hi girl! Thank you for messaging me. I’m glad to hear that you love my work and that it inspires you, and to answer your question: Can we copy and post and then tag them (the artist) saying we were insp...

Hi There! So glad that you decided to pop up here and check out my blog. It’s been years since I’ve last blogged and even that didn’t last very long (Oops!). But, if you are here, I believe that means that you saw the campaign that I’ve started on Instagram called #inspirationvsimitation. Photo and artwork by @valster73. Do not use without permission. I wrote a very long caption to go with the post on Instagram that kick-started the campaign. But in all honesty, I felt like there were still other things that I wanted to mention or address on this topic that I couldn’t fit in the IG post.  And so, with the encouragement of a dear friend, I’ve decided to write it all in a blog. This blog. In case you missed the post/caption on Instagram, let me give you a bit of a background story first (and if you have read the caption, I’ll just be repeating a few things). Several months ago I discovered someone copy my artwork along with someone else’s. This was not the first ...