Artists Using Doll Likenesses without Crediting [Mijn Schatje discussion]

It says they haven't been updated in 2 months. Are those still the ones that haven't been identified? The Myspace won't work for me since I don't have an account there.

 

I'm sorry to interrupt, but I've been reading your back posts as it's a topic I'm interested in - and looked at the radiotrash website. As a professional artist, all I can say is, "Wow!". I understand that if you do doll art, hand-drawn faces with pointed chins and big eyes - the drawing will look probably like someone's doll - but she's really pushed the limit. If she weren't in a such a "niche" market, I would think she'd be up to her butt in lawsuits. Is it already happening?
I admire the way you guys are getting the word out.

 

Renartiste - it actually takes a lot of skill to draw a doll face by hand and have it look like a company doll.
We're not really talking about how much the pictures of MS look like the doll from certain companies, but the fact they look exactly like photos other people have taken; including Companies Promo Pictures.

 

No, I'm sorry that said things badly - I understood that the pictures were traced/copied from other people's photos, which, usually leads to lawsuits. However, what I also meant was that I have seen artists snarked at for "copying" a certain doll's style, when they were freehand drawing a doll-type face.

I apologize for the misunderstanding. I shouldn't have mentioned the "drawing- copying" as it's a slightly different subject.

 

PS - and my "Wow" referred to the fact that I can't believe she got away with it - not the quality of her art. Copyright infringement to the max.

 

I've just made a "Morphing slideshow" out a few of the example images on Radiotrash's website....


It's oddly fascinating to watch.......

I posted it on my youtube under "private" I will be taking it down in a few hours, after I show it to a few of my friends who might be interested in seeing it. (and my art teacher who's become somewhat of fan of hers. )

 

I was wondering, have the galleries responded in any way?
Or Sony?

I must confess that when I first clicked on the thread, my thought were: seiously, what can some reference hurt?
But I can see from the examples you guys provided that those are not references; tbh I dont even think they are traced, some of them look more like they were simply put through some basic Photoshop filters!!!

I so hope this MS will have to pay A LOT for stealing art.... Nothing in this world hurts people like having to loose money.

 

I'm freinds with her on Myspace, she seemed really nice to be completeley honest.
But, she always told me that the work she does was based on a doll from freinds that she had permission to do.
I am in no way defending her, but it just go's to show what a liar she is.
It's nasty, but copyrite is theft and if she's making a profit of it, (wich she obviousely is) then it's just plain mean on the doll's owner.
:[

 

I've not been following MS for a while and happened to start checking once again and found on her Facepage http://www.myspace.com/mijnschatje that she's plastered the doll head/jellyfish image (Leekeworld Sleeping Head D Type) all over her background. There are 22 clearly recognizable repetitions of the face.

Further, that image is all over the internet--the doll/jellyfish image is becoming synonymous with MS. This stolen face should be extremely disturbing to Leekeworld.

As earlier reported by kimpossible (post #1576), MS will have a solo exhibition beginning Aug 27. This link will take to you to an announcement/description of the event, written in French. At the bottom of the page will be a "translate" button. Exposition à Paris du 27 au 30 Aout, chez Brugier Rigail

Japanese artist Kumisolo, aka Kumi Okamoto, also known for his work in the group "The Konki Duet" will be providing music. Seems there are still a lot of people who aren't aware of MS' lack of ethics.

Everyone, keep spreading the word.

 

I've posted the story on my Facebook, since I have a lot of classmates and also several teachers (successful artists, including one vector artist!) as friends there. It'll be interesting to see what they say about it.

 

its dusgusting!!!! how can she get away with it!!!! i mean contact galleries, etc etc! why not?

 

Oh wow! @ o I didn't even know this kind of blatant art thievery went on!

I was thinking "What, people drawing poses their dolls are in? Or what if they make a doll look like a certain character of their own and draw it then?"

But this is just blatant copy-paste stuff I've seen here. @ o;;; There's no question that this kind of stuff, like with that Mijn Schatje woman, is just terrible terrible people stealing. And it's like they're not even trying! It's so painfully obvious! And then they sell it! UNCREDITED!!! When all they did was literally copy, crop, and paste!

GAH! I can't read any more of this thread, it's making me too angry. >_<;;;

(EDIT: What I meant by "this" kind of blatant art thievery was how this woman just copy pastes the pics into her pieces while barely changing a thing, not even the reflections on their lips or eyes, I realize a lot of art thieves are out htere of course.)

 

My first post in a long time and I am here to incriminate myself. This is a hard post to type, I should probably just shut up because I have no right to say anything, but it's such a close hitting topic on something that's haunted me for a long time now I can't help my trainwreck syndome.

This case with Mijn Schatje has such a strange, sad tone to me, because I did this when I was a kid and it wasn't until I was halfway through adolescence that I got put straight. When you're in middle school and high school, none of your instructors generally assume anyone is going to need to know anything about art industry ethics, unless you're well through high school and taking a class like AP Art. Even in art school I've seen the instructors don't seem to pay it much mind at all. So a lot of people go through their early years encouraged by their teachers to paint things out of National Geographic (I remember our high school art classroom had 5 giant boxes just filled with nothing but NGs) often without anything changed, or even to cut out the photographs themselves and use them in their paintings. And then they get on the internet and they don't understand the rules at all. Or if they do it's a very, very tentative understanding, like, "It's not okay to copy the picture 100% but it is okay if I make the tiger purple and wearing a necklace." And then when the internet is opened up to them they're exposed to things like Photomanipulations and this incredible wealth of "resources" and things go bad very fast. Or in other cases they learn the rules, but that conditioning is still there and it becomes very easy to convince oneself in a moment of weakness that "just a little bit is okay, I'm still doing all this hard work and it's not going to hurt anybody." And hopefully you wise up and grow out of it before you really mess up, but sometimes if you're just not very smart you keep doing it until you have to learn the hard way that it is NOT okay. And when you're young, and also a young artist, it is hard. Assuming you have any sort of conscience at all, the guilt ends up a scar and an emotional landmark, especially if it comes down to learning via public humiliation. It's a well deserved karmatic gutpunch, and it doesn't ever stop stinging, at least not for me. But if you're in that bad habit - and that's, ultimately, what I think it is. A learned behavior, a really nasty habit that you know you shouldn't have - you NEED to get brutally slapped around like that in order to learn your lesson. You cannot change who you were, but you can change who you are.

Needless to say, this is spoken from experience. Even though it was utter shit, I wouldn't trade that experience - it'd be nice to live without the residual guilt, of course, and it's unfortunate that I was such an ass-backwards idiot to begin with, but it was one of the pivotal events in my transition from child to adult. I was fortunate in that however important it was in my tiny world, I learned my lesson early and I never profited from my mistakes. I had/have no established name, no professional reputation to protect, I was a child then and I am an absolute nobody now. Life goes on, I try to just keep looking forward. I haven't spoken about it in years... But, obviously, Mijn Schatje is not a nobody. I can only wonder what is going to happen to her?

I don't know what goes through her head, whether she's unaware of what she's doing (which seems highly unlikely), if she's got "the nasty habit," or if she really honestly feels no remorse about deceiving people at all. But regardless of her own reasons, if this becomes really well publicized out of blog posts and personal sites she's going to learn that lesson and it's going to be a very rough fall from grace. What's going to happen to her name? She's got fans and it seems like a whole bunch of gallery shows. Even if she issues a giant public apology and even if her fans forgive her, it's not going to end well for her at all. That black mark will more than likely stay on her name for a very long time, if not forever. It will make people in the industry, the ones holding all the money, reluctant to deal with her even if not because of personal opinion, they simply won't want to be associated with the name. Maybe I'm dramatizing it, I have no idea how much a scandal like this really shakes the art industry since that's a world completely above me, but it seems like it could end her career. Even if she changes her style and never looks at another BJD ever again, that's not going to be enough to make her name viable professionally. That makes me very sad for her. I do not condone what she's doing at all, I know full well that there's no good in it whatsoever and it's something that she HAS to learn believe you me, but it makes me sad because she had to learn that lesson so late.

Proportionately, very few artists ever make it to even her level of fame. She's no James Jean at ALL but she's a working artist and she's making money, which is something most artists only dream about. While it's a shame that she could lose all of that because of when she had to learn her lesson, it's even more sobering to me that it also may deprive her of her 'second chance.' I am eternally grateful to the people who somehow forgave me when I really didn't deserve it. While her fans may forgive her and allow her to redeem herself, whether she'd get a second chance from publishers, agents, and so on is an entirely different matter. I can only imagine she's an artist because she's passionate about art (which is the most underwhelming and ineffective way to express what an artist feels when they create), not because she thought it'd be a quick way to get rich. To get to a point where you can actually live off the money you make as an artist must be amazing, and to have it all come crashing down around you... I cannot even imagine how that would feel. I know we all have to get what's coming eventually and it's always rough when we do, but that's going to be something very heavy.

Anyway, that's... I guess all I have to say that's meaningful, if it's meaningful. I'm not trying to win anybody to "her side" with this incredibly baawful TL;DR and nearly topic-irrelevant post, rather I sincerely hope that she can come out and acknowledge what's been going on, at the very least come clean about her methods if she isn't going to change them. I suppose I'm just thinking up a doomsday scenario for her, maybe it's hypocritical and voyeuristic complexes all rolled into one giant psychological shitball. Even though there are more links about the art theft controversy than about her when you google 'Mijn Schatje' I guess she'll probably never fall that hard. Most likely, she'll emerge with her PR feathers a bit ruffled but with an otherwise unharmed career. Though if she did weather the storm without ever fessing up or offering even one apology it would be extremely disappointing, and an indication of exactly how little respect she has for her audience. That would most certainly kill my sympathy for her.

This is a long thread, I didn't read all of it. Mostly enough to get a tentative grasp of her situation. I am sure this has already been discussed extensively, and the only thing I've done is sour my own name... but I couldn't help but post, anyway. At the very least, it's been a little cathartic to do so, so whatever, I guess.


/edit for some grammar

/edit2 I just read through the radiotrash website.
My sympathy is pretty dead now.

 

I decided to Google her name today for the heck of it and I found something new on the first page. Mijn Schatje also has an account on Infectious.com, which is a community of online artists who make skins for laptops, iPhone, iPod, cars, walls, etc. Guess what she's selling on her own account?

http://www.infectious.com/laptop-skins/MijnSchatje/sirene/323

Yep, it's one of the controversial images that, according to the evidence posted on Radiotrash's site, have been ripped off of Audrey Kawasaki. And she's charging nearly $30 for it.

You should also read her Artist Profile, especially this one:

(sarcasm)Yeah, right! (/sarcasm) Her apologies sound so hollow when she continues to do stuff like that.

 

Silencieux, I completely understand where you're coming from. I really do believe that Mijn probably didn't realize it was a serious copyright violation when she created these images. I think she found herself in hot water very fast, once the allegations came to light.

If she had apologized when the copyright issue was brought forward to her in the first place and agreed to cease the sale of images for which she didn't have the rights... then I would certainly be willing to give her a second chance. Anyone can screw up. A simple "I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was wrong, I'll do things differently from now on" would have been enough to put things mostly to rights. (There's still a financial tangle there, but ethically it would have put her back on decent footing).

However, it's the way she's behaved since the allegations that has caused me to lose respect for her. Flat-out lies upon lies, trying to cover her tracks. That's what lost her "second chance" in my book.

(A post similar to this one was made some pages ago... but it's a very long thread. )

 

I wonder if any of the doll companies were able to do anything about this... ;_;
Or, indeed, Audrey Kawasaki or any of the other artists involved!

 

Silencieux - I understand where you are coming from. I took a little computer graphic class in high school which was pretty much just about tracing images in Illustrator. I think vector art especially has this idea about it that tracing is okay, and maybe in a high school setting while you are learning it is, but not without permission as a professional artist. The problem is that if you are teaching your students to trace, they keep with that practice. The sad thing with Mijn is that she obviously knew it was wrong because she lied about it in the beginning and most likely will never fess up or offer an apology. I don't know her, but from everything I have read she seems extremely manipulative. She is very good at twisting words, which is why I think Leeke gave her permission (which I think was very bad since that tells her what she did was okay and she is obviously now running with that). She seems very sweet but I can only imagine what kind of a person she really is to have reacted to this all the way she did. The worst thing is that she is profiting off of others' hard work since the great majority of her art is traced, and what is not is mediocre at best. She may call vectoring over an image hard work but it is nothing like making a doll, not to mention painting and than photographing it. Sadly, I won't be surprised she is going to get away with it virtually unscathed.

 

TheFontBandit, I agree completely. In truth, I hadn't really seen or heard much about MS until I logged into DoA for the first time in a while and saw this thread on the main forum's page, but I figured she hadn't acknowledged the accusations at all yet. Radiotrash makes it quite clear that is not the case at all. Of course I would expect her to "struggle" and try and make up a lie to get out of confessing the first time someone showed her solid evidence, or the second time just out of how unreal the situation must've felt. Even though it's impossible to escape the truth, it's a product of intense fear and disbelief over the fact that you're caught. But obviously she's been questioned about this numerous times and she shows no remorse whatsoever since she not only keeps on lying but she also posted that WIP of her continuing to do what she's always done. That, the lack of remorse even after being caught red handed and revealed to everyone, I find rather distasteful. How hard is it just to admit that you were doing wrong and apologize? Hard emotionally, sure... or maybe it's not for her. Maybe because she just keeps doing it, it's an indication that she really doesn't care and she feels the rules don't apply to her, I don't know. But her confession and apology are way past due, even I know that, and that this point while I'm still willing to give her a second chance after she comes clean and throws off her old ways I can't say I feel very sympathetic for her situation at all anymore. :'/

firefly5003 - I can only imagine how those sculptors who saw their dolls being profited from must feel. I tried making a doll head once and it was crazy. That's not even the entire doll... Vectoring is hard, Illustrator is nothing short of a hassle to work with as a drawing tool, but it's not hard enough to make up for what she's done.

I agree that she is manipulative. She might see it as fighting for her livelihood. It's unfortunate that she thinks she needs to use other people's works to make it in the art world, it shows she has no faith or confidence in her own skills and creative ideas whatsoever. The fact that she became successful on it only reinforced it.

 

firefly5003 - But Leeke had the situation explained to them correctly, and said they were looking into legal action as well. But yes, initially, they agreed to whatever lie she told them.

 

I second that also . Sadly, as soon as they realized that they were dealing with an art thief, it was already too late. Their doll pictures (official and private) have been so desecrated and sold for huge profit. What's worse, the buyers themselves were also not aware of her blatant crime.