Venema Original Art

Published October 15, 2025

Whether you are putting your artwork up on your website or posting it on social media, it’s always worrying that someone could take your work. Here I will explain two of the ways I help prevent this from happening to my work.

Low Resolution Photos:

A lot of times when you put photos online people will tell you to make sure the resolution is high so that your photos are not blurry or pixelated. The reason I disagree with doing this is that having a high resolution photo means that anyone can take that photo off of the internet and print it as a high quality piece. Keeping your photos at a lower resolution is safer and if someone does try and print your photo it will not have the crispness and clarity that you would get with a higher resolution photo. On the other hand don’t make the resolution so low that you can’t make out the photo. Seventy-two is the typical resolution that I use when putting my photos online, but if for whatever reason that is to blurry you could bring it up to ninety.

Watermarks:

Even if you have a signature on your artwork there are ways to remove signatures and you do not need fancy software to do it since nowadays most computers and some phones come with pretty good photo editing options that have ways to remove spots on images. Watermarks are a great way to deal with this issue. When you put a watermark on your photos you are placing your own digital signature on them and because a watermark can be any size you can place it over a large part of your photo making it unlikely that anyone will be able to remove it. Another great thing about a watermark is that it is uniquely yours so you can make it a simple signature or you can turn it into a piece of art in itself. And if you are worried about it covering too much of your art, but still want to keep your work safe, you can always make the watermark with low opacity so that it covers the photo but you can still see the art behind it.

~SV