How Watermarks Claim Ownership of Your Art

In this post we want to share about watermarks: what they are, their history and how you can use a watermark to claim ownership of your art.

I love paper.

I love the smell of it.

The tangy scent wafting from a newly opened ream of paper smells heavenly. I love the aroma of a used-bookstore crammed with musty old tomes.

And I love the feel of quality paper.

There’s no end to the variety of textures and colors of papers.

And an elegant watermark eclipses any other sign of quality paper?  However, we hardly see them these days.  In the past, most paper had watermarks (like really long ago, in the previous century), but over time they have disappeared from everyday life.

I’ve been picking up different pieces of paper I have around here and holding them up to the light, but not a one has a watermark.  Now I’m curious.  What is the story about watermarks?

Historically, what is a watermark?

First of all, if you’ve never seen a watermark on a piece of paper, it’s very important that you go to a stationer’s and check out a sample.  Run your fingers over the surface.  Do you feel something?  Hold it up to the light.  Do you see something like this?

Isn’t that an elegant feature on a piece of paper?  Now, imagine a paper with your logo, your company name, or your special identification symbol.

The pictured sample is an affordable watermarked paper I use when I need fine paper for a memorial folder, for example.  It’s also advertised as resume paper –  a paper dressed to impress!

There’s another special quality of this paper.  It comes packaged in a really satisfying way.  It’s not slap-wrapped with some stenciled paper like a ream from a Big Box Store.  You break a seal, then lift the lid of the box to extract your paper.  A Real Box you can close and safely store the remaining papers you will use sparingly.  These beautiful papers aren’t anything like the scraps you use for your grocery list.

How do watermarks claim ownership?

Today, watermarks are used as a symbol of prestige and the satisfaction of a quality paper that is exclusively one’s own.  Some professions, however, like lawyers and bankers and presidents, use watermarks for security.  A true watermark is proof of where and when the document was issued.  Watermarks are indelible, and impressed into the wet pulp when the paper is manufactured.

A Private Watermark provides both security and authenticity.

• It cannot be removed, altered or duplicated.
• It’s a permanent part of the paper.
• It is an extension of your corporate image.
• It conveys confidence.

Neenahpaper.com

How is a watermark made?

Ever heard of a dandy roll?  I know, I hadn’t either.  Sounds like a yummy dinner roll.

Way back in 1826 a man named John Marshall was the Henry Ford of watermark producers.  His dandy roll consisted of a light roller covered by a sort of window screening embossed with a pattern.  While I won’t go into details about laid wires and chain wires, if you really need to know about that, Wikipedia explains it quite well.  Wires press on the wet paper pulp, which then creates thinner paper where the wire pattern squeezes down.  More light transmits through the thinner paper where the pattern is, thus giving this type of paper the term laid paper.  Pretty dandy, right?

This is what the machine looks like, and its main idea hasn’t changed through the centuries.  

Where should you place a watermark?

Apparently choosing the placement of a watermark is totally random.  It’s whatever you want.  NeenahPaper.com offers seven ways:

1. The watermark, or just part of one, appears anywhere.
2. You choose the spot and the mark will never vary more than .5″ from that spot.
3. Localized Center. Exactly centered top to bottom, left to right.
4. You choose the spot, anywhere vertically, but centered horizontally.
5. Two or more watermarks parading down the paper, horizontally or vertically, localized or random.
6. Produced like paraded watermarks, but usually diagonally, either localized or random.
7. Get watermark happy and just fill the paper with your special design.

Now all I have to do is design a mark, and I can choose from this list of placements.  But to reach really elite status, which placement wins?  I’ll leave you to research that.

Where should you use watermarks?

Artists and authors worry about the images they place online.  Anyone can copy and paste and then pass your hard work off as their own.  Unfortunately, many ways of adding identification leave just as many ways to remove it. (Just as the “watermark” on our design at the beginning of this post is an example of ID that could easily be removed.)

I took a wonderful class on card making with Kate Harper Designs, and this is what she says about keeping your images safe:

I recommend that whenever imagery is going to be published on the internet (or elsewhere) that the artist take the time and trouble to register the Works being published.

This can now be done online for $35 [at the time of this quote] at www.copyright.gov. By releasing a bunch of works in a single publication process, the whole lot of them can be registered for the same cost.

Kate Harper

What are the benefits of copyright registration?

Kate Harper recommends these three benefits of filing for a copyright for your designs:

• There’ll be proof of the date of your art, against someone claiming you copied their work when actually they created theirs after your registration.
• You’ll have the right to claim statutory damages beyond an infringer’s profits. Those damages can range from $750 minimum up to $150K per act of Willful Infringement.
• It gives you the right to recover any attorney fees, but only if you registered your art before the claim of infringement or within 3 months of publication.

Many authors of websites mark the images they post so they won’t lose their identity in the vast internet. However, there are varying views about watermarking images.  Pixlr.com makes a good argument against doing so, however if you feel you need to, they advise making the marks super subtle.

Put a watermark in the bottom right-hand corner with a low opacity. If you consider your photos works of art, mark them in the way Picasso and other artists have always signed their work – somewhat unobtrusively.

pixlr.com

Do you use watermarks to claim ownership?

Now let’s hear your thoughts on this topic. 🙂