You Might Be Wearing Stolen Art
The best way to support digital artists is to call out stolen work
In this age of copy-and-paste design, imitation often isn’t the sincerest form of flattery — it’s outright copyright infringement. Last week, the internet was abuzz with news of a revenge bot that called out artwork thieves, but the bots aren’t just looking for people tweeting about wanting art on a T-shirt. They’re everywhere.
Virginia Poltrack is a prolific illustrator based in the technology community. She spends her time working on specialized projects for clients like Google, but she’s also taken a few of her sketches and transformed them into purchasable T-shirts through partnerships with artist-friendly retailers like Cotton Bureau. Some of her more popular designs include a T-shirt with Android versions named after candy, Star Wars’ famous lightsabers and blasters, and another with a two-toned Nintendo Switch controller. One of Poltrack’s most recent designs is a well-manicured hand with a snake coiled around it. The phrase “assume all women are technical and capable of breathing fire” penned underneath. The shirt is available on Cotton Bureau, with 100% of the proceeds donated to the nonprofit Black Girls Code.
“That shirt design is personal.”
