I Did Something Awful

I need to own up to this. A few weeks ago, I set about making the poster for the next Fetish Multifarium. After an evening of searching for the perfect stock image, I finally found one that was the perfect Catholic crown and used it on our "All Spanks Day" event poster. Last Saturday, I logged into facebook to find a local artist had posted a picture of our poster and commented that it used a picture of a headdress she had made. I told her I had found it searching through stock imagery and set about digging through my history to find exactly where it had come from. As I dug, I started to get a sinking feeling. I had pulled the image from a yahoo search without checking to make sure the image was in fact the "free stock" criteria I had spent an hour hunting for. It took me about forty minutes to compose my confession to the artist, and I still haven't gotten a response yet. I offered to pay her for the two weeks the poster was up at the Mercury, which I will gladly do out of my own pocket. I'm so angry at myself. This is something I've tsked at others for doing, something I've spoken against. I fully deserve whatever wrath is brought down on me by the original artist and will accept it without argument. It doesn't matter how tired I was or that I thought it was a stock photo, what I did was theft. What's worse is that it's an artist I really admire and every time I see her posting about her hard work I always think 'Yeah, you go girl' and see it as an inspiration. After two days of harsh self-deprecation, I have to look towards the future. I'm officially firing myself from graphic design work and have already spoken to some local artists to bring on as my go-to. This brings on an added expense for every event and means I have to get the copy and such out early. But hopefully this means I can dedicate that extra time I would spend on posters making the event better, which is important if I need to make that extra cash to pay a poster artist. Hopefully the silver lining on this will be that I will have to work harder to compensate for the extra money I have to spend. Many people have told me that if I can't afford to do something right, I shouldn't do it at all, and as much as I've fought against that as a classist argument that hurts the literal starving artists, there is some truth in it.  I'm deeply sorry for what I did. I'm doing what I can to fix it, although damage is done. What I can do is look forward and work to make sure this doesn't happen again.