The chihuahua is small. That’s the first thing the artwork tells you, before the lettering, before the joke. A tan cartoon dog, maybe four inches tall on the chest of a shirt, standing in front of a brick wall with red boxing gloves on its front paws. Above it, in cream letters: I GOT THAT DOG. Below it: IN ME. And behind it, cast against the brick, a black wolf-shaped shadow that is three times the dog’s size.

I keep looking at the shadow. Not the dog. The shadow.

Here is what the design does, visually, and it’s a smarter move than most meme shirts bother with. The wolf is not a second animal. It’s a shadow — the same silhouette logic you’d use in a comic panel to show a character’s interior state without drawing a thought bubble. The chihuahua’s body is small and round and slightly ridiculous in those gloves. The shadow is lean and tall and has nothing cute about it. The gap between the two is the entire joke, and also, if you sit with it, the entire problem.

I’m an illustrator. I spend a lot of hours at a desk in Portland making things that are, by most external measures, small. A spot illustration for a regional magazine. A book cover for a small press. A poster for a neighborhood event that pays in exposure and a grocery gift card. None of it casts a wolf shadow. Most of it casts a shadow roughly the size of the chihuahua, which is to say: the shadow of a thing that is exactly as big as it looks.

The shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective. Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. You can find the listing here. I’m writing about the artwork, not reviewing the garment, because the artwork is the part that has something to say.

What it says, to me, is about the gap between output and self-concept. The phrase “I got that dog in me” is a piece of internet vernacular that means something like: I have a competitive or resilient or slightly unhinged quality that you might not expect from looking at me. The design literalizes that. The chihuahua is the looking-at-me part. The wolf shadow is the claim. The brick wall is just a wall — no symbolism there, it’s a backdrop, it gives the shadow something to fall on.

But here’s the thing I can’t stop noticing. The shadow is a shadow. It isn’t the dog. It’s what the dog casts when the light is right. And a shadow is not a promise. It’s not a plan. It’s not a portfolio. It’s a shape that appears under certain conditions and disappears when the light changes.

I have spent years trying to figure out whether the wolf shadow is real. Whether the work I make on a Tuesday afternoon — the small, unglamorous, poorly paid work — is actually the chihuahua, and the wolf is the thing I’m building toward, the thing that will eventually be visible. Or whether the wolf is just what I tell myself when the invoice is late and the rent is due and the client has gone quiet. A shadow I cast on a wall to feel bigger than I am.

The design doesn’t answer that. It just puts both animals in the same frame and lets you decide which one you’re looking at.

What I appreciate about it, as a piece of visual communication, is the restraint. The lettering is cream, not white — softer, less shouty. The chihuahua is tan, not brown, not black. The gloves are red, which is the only saturated color in the whole composition, and they’re small. The wolf shadow is black, flat, no detail. It’s a silhouette. It doesn’t have eyes. It doesn’t have a face. It’s just a shape that says: something bigger is here, or was here, or could be here.

I’ve drawn a lot of shadows in my life. In comics, a shadow is a cheap way to add depth. You fill a shape with black and suddenly the panel has a second layer. But a shadow that’s bigger than its object is a different tool. It’s not depth. It’s aspiration, or anxiety, or both. It’s the visual equivalent of saying “I’m not what I look like” and hoping someone believes you.

The shirt doesn’t cure anything. It doesn’t make the invoices arrive faster or the client emails shorter or the rent lower. It’s a piece of cotton with a picture on it. But the picture is doing something I recognize. It’s holding two truths in one frame: the small dog and the big shadow. The thing you see and the thing you feel like. The output and the self-concept. The chihuahua and the wolf.

I don’t know which one I am most days. I suspect the answer is both, and neither, and that the shadow only shows up when the light is right — which is to say, when someone is looking, or when I’m scared, or when I’ve had enough coffee to believe my own press.

The dog is still small. The shadow is still there. The wall doesn’t care either way.

The yellow triangle is the first thing I see. Not the words, not the hand — the triangle, that specific caution-sign yellow, the one that lives on wet-floor signs and electrical panels and the little plastic tag on a new hair dryer. It sits at the top of the design like a warning label peeled off a piece of industrial equipment and pressed onto cotton. Below it, in block lettering: NOT FRIENDLY. Below that: DO NOT TOUCH. And to the side or beneath, depending on how the print falls, a hand with a slash through it — the universal gesture for no, the same crossed-out hand you see on a door in a country where you don’t speak the language.

This is the artwork on the Not Friendly Do Not Touch Funny Warning Sign Introvert shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective. I’m looking at the design as a piece of visual communication, not as a product I’ve worn. The observation is simple: it borrows the grammar of public safety signage and applies it to a person. That’s the whole joke, and it’s a good one, because the grammar is doing most of the work.

Here’s what I mean. A warning sign doesn’t argue. It doesn’t explain. It doesn’t say please consider or I’d prefer or sorry, I’m just tired. It states a condition and an instruction. Condition: not friendly. Instruction: do not touch. The crossed-out hand is redundant, technically — the words already told you — but redundancy is how safety signage works. You read the words, you see the symbol, you get it in two channels. The design trusts the viewer to understand that this is a joke about a person, not a hazard, and it trusts the wearer to enjoy being the hazard.

I keep thinking about the scale of the lettering. NOT FRIENDLY is set larger than DO NOT TOUCH, or at least it reads that way in the preview — the first line carries the emotional content, the second line carries the instruction. That’s a deliberate hierarchy. If you flip it, if DO NOT TOUCH were the headline, the shirt becomes aggressive. With NOT FRIENDLY on top, it becomes a confession. The wearer is admitting something about themselves before they issue the boundary. That’s a different kind of joke. It’s softer. It’s the difference between a bouncer and a cat.

The crossed-out hand is where the design gets interesting to me as an illustrator. A hand is hard to draw small. You’ve got fingers, knuckles, a wrist, a thumb — all of it has to read at a glance, at a distance, on fabric that moves. The version here is simplified, which is correct. It’s a pictogram, not an anatomical study. The slash goes through it at an angle, the way prohibition signs do. I don’t know who drew it. I don’t know if it was drawn by hand or assembled from vector parts. But the effect is the same: it looks like it belongs on a laminated card in a break room, and that’s the point.

What I find myself circling back to is the phrase itself. Not friendly. Not shy. Not anxious. Not introverted, which is the word the listing uses in its title. The shirt doesn’t say introvert. It says not friendly, which is a harder, flatter, more honest-sounding thing. Introvert is a personality category. Not friendly is a verdict. The design chooses the verdict. That’s a choice with some teeth in it, and I respect it.

There’s a version of this shirt that would be mean. It would say something like don’t talk to me or go away or I hate people. Those shirts exist. They’re fine. But they’re hostile in a way that invites a response — they’re trying to start something. This one isn’t trying to start anything. It’s trying to end something before it begins. It’s a preemptive no. The caution triangle does a lot of that work. A caution triangle is not angry. It’s bureaucratic. It’s the voice of a sign, not a person. And that’s the trick: the wearer gets to be unfriendly without actually being unfriendly, because the sign is doing the talking.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of creative work, because that’s where my head lives. Freelance illustration is a job where you are constantly asked to be friendly. You’re friendly in the inquiry email. You’re friendly in the estimate. You’re friendly when the client asks for a revision that undoes the thing you liked. You’re friendly when the invoice is thirty days late and you’re writing the second follow-up. The friendliness is not fake, exactly — I like most of my clients — but it is performed, and performance costs something. A shirt that says NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH is a fantasy of not performing. It’s the break room sign you wish you could hang on your own ribcage. It’s not a solution. It’s a joke about wanting a solution.

I don’t own this shirt. I haven’t worn it. I can’t tell you how it fits or how the print holds up after a wash. What I can tell you is that the design understands something about boundaries: that the clearest way to state one is to borrow the language of a system that doesn’t care about your feelings. A caution triangle doesn’t apologize. It doesn’t soften. It just tells you what’s true and what to do about it. That’s a useful thing to look at, even if you never put it on.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The yellow triangle sits there on the chest, patient, official, a little absurd. It’s the kind of graphic that works because it doesn’t try to be clever. It just repeats what the sign already knows.

There is a dashed circle at the upper left of the shirt, and a solid ball at the lower right, and between them a white ramp curves downward like a skate park for something that has already given up. Above it all, in capitals: I HAD POTENTIAL.

The design is a physics diagram that never got to run its experiment. The dashed circle is the object at rest — the thing that could have been, the mass that never got pushed. The solid ball is where it ended up. The ramp is the distance between them, and it curves, which matters. A straight diagonal would be a slide, a fall, a simple loss of altitude. A curve implies acceleration, a path, a body in motion. But the ball isn’t moving. It’s parked on the lower ledge like it got there and decided to stay.

I keep looking at that dashed circle. In physics diagrams, a dashed outline usually means a former position or a predicted one — the ghost of where something was, or the guess of where it’s going. Here it reads as both. The potential was up there once. It’s not anymore. The shirt doesn’t say what happened. It just shows the before and after and lets the curve do the talking.

I’ve been thinking about this design because it’s the kind of joke that works on two levels, and the second level is the one that stings. The first level is the pun: potential energy, the physics concept, reduced to a punchline about a person who didn’t live up to it. Ha. The second level is the diagram itself, which is drawn with real care. The dashed circle is a specific visual convention. The solid ball is a specific visual convention. The curved ramp is a specific visual convention. Someone who knows what a physics diagram looks like made this. Someone who has sat in a classroom and copied a diagram off a whiteboard and understood that the dashed line means something different from the solid one.

That’s the part I can’t stop noticing. The joke is about failure, but the execution is about competence. The shirt is well-made as a piece of graphic design. The lettering is clean. The spacing is deliberate. The curve is smooth. It’s not a sloppy meme slapped on a blank. It’s a diagram that someone drew on purpose, with intent, and then captioned with a sentence about not having intent.

I recognize the impulse. I’ve spent years making things that look like they were made by someone who knew what they were doing, while privately feeling like the dashed circle — a predicted position that never got confirmed. The portfolio looks solid. The invoices are late. The sketchbook is full. The bank account is not. The gap between the quality of the work and the quality of the life it supports is the whole joke, and the shirt knows it.

What I like about the design is that it doesn’t explain itself. There’s no caption under the diagram. No arrow pointing to the dashed circle with a label that says ‘you, probably.’ The text is above the image, not below it, which means you read the sentence first and then look down and see the evidence. That order matters. You get the claim, then you get the proof. The proof is a ball that didn’t roll.

I’ve seen versions of this joke before — the ‘I had potential’ phrase is a common one, and it shows up on shirts and mugs and stickers in various forms. What makes this one work is the specificity of the visual. It’s not a generic sad face or a shrugging stick figure. It’s a diagram. It’s the kind of thing you’d find in a textbook, repurposed as a self-portrait. The humor comes from the mismatch between the precision of the drawing and the resignation of the text.

There’s a version of this shirt that would be meaner. It would show the ball at the bottom and the dashed circle at the top and add a little arrow with the word ‘gravity’ and a little arrow with the word ‘choices.’ It would explain the joke until it died. This one doesn’t do that. It trusts you to know what a dashed circle means. It trusts you to see the curve and understand that the ball could have kept going, but didn’t.

I don’t know who made this design. I don’t know if they’re a physicist or an illustrator or someone who just likes the joke. But I know they understand something about how to draw a failure. You don’t draw the fall. You draw the setup and the aftermath and let the viewer fill in the middle. The dashed circle is the setup. The solid ball is the aftermath. The curve is the thing that happened in between, which is invisible, which is the whole point.

The shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective, and you can find it here. It’s a standard t-shirt with a white print on a dark background, and the diagram is legible from a few feet away. I’m not going to tell you it’s comfortable or that it fits well or that it changed my life. I haven’t worn it. I’ve just looked at it, the way I look at any piece of graphic design that does more than it has to.

What I keep coming back to is the dashed circle. It’s empty. It’s not a ball that fell. It’s not a ball that’s about to fall. It’s a position that was occupied once, or could have been, and now isn’t. The solid ball is real. The dashed circle is a memory or a prediction. The shirt doesn’t say which. That ambiguity is the best thing about it. You can read it as regret or as a warning or as a simple statement of fact. The diagram doesn’t care. The diagram just shows you the curve and lets you decide what it means.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this design works when so many similar jokes don’t. I think it’s because the visual is doing the emotional work. The text is the setup. The image is the punchline. And the punchline is not ‘haha, you failed.’ The punchline is ‘here is a diagram of a thing that didn’t happen.’ That’s sadder and funnier and more honest than any caption could be.

The ball is solid. The circle is dashed. The ramp is curved. That’s all the shirt says. Everything else is what you bring to it.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

There is a stack of paper on the corner of my drafting table that has survived three apartments, two laptops, and one very bad breakup. It is forty pages long. It is a comic. I have shown it to no one.

Not my partner. Not my studio mate. Not the editor who once asked, over coffee on Division, what I was working on “for myself.” I said, “Oh, you know. Small stuff.” That was in 2022. The stack has grown since then. It has also, in a sense, not grown at all, because I keep redrawing page one.

I want to be honest about what this project is and isn’t. It isn’t a secret masterpiece. It isn’t a graphic novel in progress that I’m quietly shopping to publishers. It’s a forty-page comic that I’ve been drawing for three years, and the reason I’ve shown it to no one is not mysterious. It’s the same reason I’ve rewritten the same invoice email four times this week. It’s the same reason I checked my bank balance before writing this sentence.

What the stack actually is

Forty pages. Pencil, ink, and a gray wash I mix from two tubes of Holbein. The paper is a ream of Strathmore 300 series bristol. I buy materials maybe twice a year.

So the material cost of this comic, over three years, is maybe $180. That’s the number I can point to. The number I can’t point to is the hours. I don’t log them. I know that I’ve drawn page one at least eleven times. I know that pages 12 through 18 were finished in a burst in February 2024, during a slow invoice month, and that I haven’t touched page 19 since.

Here’s the thing about a project you never show anyone: it has no deadline, no client, no editor, no audience. That sounds like freedom. It is not freedom. It is a room with no door, and you keep walking into the walls.

The money part, plainly

I’m a freelance illustrator. My income is irregular in the way that weather is irregular. Some years are good. Some years are not. I had a good year once and thought I had figured something out. I hadn’t. I had a good year.

When you have a bad year, you do not have a savings account. You have a checking account and a feeling. When you have a good year, you have a checking account, a savings account, and the conviction that next year will be the same. It won’t be.

The forty-page comic costs me nothing in the sense that it doesn’t have a client. It costs me everything in the sense that every hour I spend on it is an hour I’m not spending on a $400 spot illustration or a $1,200 book cover. I know this. I do the math in my head while I’m inking. That’s part of why it’s taken three years.

There’s a specific fear that lives in the gap between invoices. It’s not the fear of not making rent. I’ve made rent. It’s the fear that the work I do for money and the work I do for myself are two different people, and that the second one is not very good.

What the law says about a thing no one has seen

Here’s a fact that surprised me: under U.S. copyright law, my forty-page comic has been protected since the moment I fixed it in a tangible medium. That’s it. No registration required. No publication required. No one has to see it.

The U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular 1 states that copyright protection “exists automatically from the moment the original work of authorship is fixed.” A work is “fixed” when it’s captured in a medium “sufficiently permanent” that it can be perceived or reproduced “for more than a short time.” My stack of bristol counts. The scans on my hard drive count.

This matters to me for a reason that isn’t legal. It matters because it means the work is real before anyone validates it. The law doesn’t care if I’ve shown it to no one. The law says it’s mine, and it’s protected, and it exists.

Registration is a separate thing. Circular 1 notes that while registration isn’t mandatory, it’s necessary to enforce exclusive rights through litigation for U.S. works. It also notes that registration before or within three months of publication makes a copyright owner eligible for statutory damages and attorneys’ fees. I haven’t registered my comic. I might, eventually. But the point is that the work is already real. The registration would just make it easier to defend.

I think about this more than I should. I think about it when I’m redrawing page one for the twelfth time. The law says the work exists. My brain says the work exists only if someone sees it. The law is more generous than my brain.

The rituals that keep it going

I have a cheap, repeatable ritual for this comic. It costs nothing and takes twenty minutes. Every Sunday morning, before I open my email, I make a cup of coffee in the same mug — a chipped ceramic thing I bought at a garage sale in Sellwood for $2 — and I sit down at the drafting table and I draw one panel. Not a page. One panel. I don’t ink it. I don’t fix it. I just draw it.

That’s it. That’s the ritual. Twenty minutes, one panel, every Sunday. Some weeks the panel is good. Most weeks it’s not. But the ritual isn’t about the panel. It’s about the fact that the comic stays alive in my hands. It doesn’t become a thing I used to work on. It stays a thing I’m working on.

I have other rituals. I walk to the Hawthorne Bridge and back when I’m stuck on a page. That’s about 2.5 miles round trip from my apartment. I don’t bring my phone. I don’t bring a sketchbook. I just walk. The walking doesn’t solve the page. But it makes the page feel less like a verdict.

I buy a single donut from Pip’s on Fremont every time I finish a page. That’s $2.50. Over three years, that’s maybe $100. I’m not going to pretend that’s a financial strategy. It’s a bribe. It works.

The thing about showing no one

I’ve been asked, gently, by people who care about me, when I’m going to show someone the comic. I don’t have a good answer. The honest answer is that I’m afraid it’s not good. The other honest answer is that I’m afraid it is good, and then I’ll have to do something with it.

There’s a specific kind of paralysis that comes from a project with no external deadline. You can’t miss a deadline that doesn’t exist. You can’t fail a client you don’t have. You can’t disappoint an audience that doesn’t know you’re making anything. The absence of stakes feels like safety. It’s not. It’s a way of never finding out.

I’m not going to end this by saying I’m finally going to show someone. I might. I might not. The comic is forty pages long and I’ve been drawing it for three years and I’ve shown it to no one. That’s the fact. The fact is not a lesson. It’s just where I am.

But here’s what I know: the work is real. The law says so. The stack of paper says so. The $180 in materials says so. The Sunday mornings say so. Whether anyone else ever sees it is a different question, and I’m not done asking it yet.

FAQ

Do I need to register my unpublished comic with the U.S. Copyright Office?

No. Under U.S. law, copyright protection exists automatically from the moment your work is fixed in a tangible medium. Registration is not required for protection. However, registration (or refusal) is necessary before you can file an infringement lawsuit for a U.S. work, and registering before or within three months of publication can make you eligible for statutory damages and attorneys’ fees. See the U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular 1 for details.

Can I show my unpublished work to a publisher without losing my rights?

Showing your work to a publisher does not transfer your copyright. Copyright transfer generally must be in writing and signed by the copyright owner. Mere ownership of a copy of your work does not give anyone the copyright. If a publisher wants to license or acquire rights, that’s a separate negotiation. The U.S. Copyright Office’s Circular 1 covers transfer of copyright ownership.

What if someone uses my unpublished comic without permission?

You have exclusive rights to reproduce, distribute, and display your work, among others, from the moment it’s fixed. If someone uses it without authorization, you may be able to bring an infringement action. For U.S. works, registration (or refusal) is necessary before filing a lawsuit. The Copyright Office’s FAQ on fair use notes that there are no legal rules permitting a specific number of words or percentage of a work to be used without permission; whether a use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances.

How do I manage irregular income as a freelancer?

I don’t have a formula. I have a checking account, a savings account when I can, and a habit of checking my balance before I make decisions. The National Endowment for the Arts publishes an Arts Data Profile Series with statistics on arts and cultural production, which can be useful for understanding the broader economic context. But the day-to-day management is mostly about knowing your numbers and not pretending they’re different than they are.

What’s a cheap ritual that helps sustain a long-term project?

Mine is twenty minutes every Sunday morning, one panel, same mug. It costs nothing. The point isn’t productivity. The point is keeping the project in your hands. A ritual that’s too ambitious becomes another thing to fail at. A ritual that’s small enough to do even on a bad week is the one that lasts.

In March I drew a poster for the free fridge on my block. It took four hours. The fridge sits outside a bike shop on North Williams, and the volunteers who stock it wanted something better than the index card taped to the door. I drew a hand holding a carton of eggs, a little rain, a phone number. I printed it at the copy shop on Alberta for $1.87 and taped it up myself.

Two weeks later I got an email from someone at a community center. They had seen the poster. They wanted the PDF.

Not a print. The file. For their newsletter, their social, maybe a banner at an event. They said it was for the neighborhood, which it was. They said they loved it, which felt good. They did not say anything about money, and I did not ask, because I had already given the drawing away for free and it seemed rude to change the terms after the fact.

That is the whole essay, really. Everything after this is just me trying to explain why I sent the PDF and then sat in my kitchen for twenty minutes feeling weird about it.

What I actually gave away

Here is the part I did not think about in March. Under U.S. law, copyright exists automatically the moment an original work is fixed in a tangible medium. The U.S. Copyright Office says this plainly in Circular 1: protection “exists automatically from the moment the original work of authorship is fixed.” I did not need to register the poster. I did not need a copyright notice. The drawing was mine the second I saved the file.

What I gave away in March was a copy. I printed it and taped it to a fridge. That is not the same as giving away the copyright. The Copyright Office is explicit about this too: “Mere ownership of a copy or phonorecord that embodies a work does not give the owner of that copy or phonorecord the ownership of the copyright in the work.”

So when the community center asked for the PDF, they were not asking for the poster. They were asking for the file that lets them reproduce the poster, which is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. The others include preparing derivative works and distributing copies to the public. I still owned all of that. I just did not act like it.

This is not a legal problem. It is a habits problem. I have spent years learning to draw hands and almost no time learning to say, in a friendly way, “sure, here is what that includes.”

The invoice I did not send

Let me put numbers on this, because vague financial fear is worse than specific financial fear.

Self-employment tax is the part that gets me. The IRS treats self-employed people as both employer and employee for Social Security and Medicare. Publication 334 lays out the basics: if you carry on a trade or business as a sole proprietor or independent contractor, you are self-employed, and your earnings are subject to self-employment tax. You do not have to work full-time to count. A part-time illustration practice counts.

So when I say I drew the poster for free, I mean I drew it for free and also paid self-employment tax on the zero dollars it earned, which is a sentence that makes my accountant laugh in a way I have learned not to take personally.

What a PDF actually is

There is a technical thing here that matters more than people admit. A PDF is not one thing. It is a container. The same file can be a proof, a print-ready document, or a locked-down web version, and the difference is in how it is built.

A proof PDF is usually RGB, compressed, maybe 150 dpi, with fonts embedded or not depending on how lazy I was that day. It looks fine on a screen. It will look soft if you print it at 24 by 36 inches.

A print-ready PDF is usually CMYK or a spot-color setup, 300 dpi at final size, with bleeds and crop marks if the printer needs them, and fonts either embedded or converted to outlines. It is heavier. It is less flexible. It is the file you send to a printer, not the file you send to a newsletter editor who is going to drop it into Canva and stretch it.

When the community center asked for “the PDF,” they meant the proof. They wanted something they could put in a newsletter. I sent them the proof. I did not send the layered source file, and I did not send the print-ready version, because those are different things and I have learned, slowly, to keep them separate.

This is not stinginess. It is the same reason a bakery does not hand out the recipe when you buy a loaf. The proof is the loaf. The source file is the recipe.

The email I should have sent

Here is what I actually sent, more or less:

Hi — happy to share. Attached is a screen-resolution PDF for newsletter and social use. Please credit me as Jordan Kwinn. If you need a print-ready file for a banner or poster, let me know and I can prepare one for a small fee.

That is fine. It is not great. A better version would have named the scope more clearly, because “newsletter and social use” is doing a lot of work in one sentence. A better version would have said: this license is for this one use, for this one organization, for this one year. If you want to use it again, ask me again.

I did not say that because I was worried it would sound like I was being difficult about a free drawing. But the drawing was free. The license is a separate thing. The Copyright Office notes that a transfer of copyright ownership generally must be in writing and signed by the owner, while a nonexclusive license does not require a written agreement. That means the email itself can be the license. Which means the email is worth writing carefully.

I am not a lawyer. I am an illustrator who has read enough Copyright Office circulars to know that “sure, here you go” is a license, whether or not I meant it as one.

What Portland actually requires

I looked this up because I wanted to know if the community center had rules I should have known about. Portland Parks & Recreation operates nine community centers and two arts centers across the city, according to the bureau’s community centers page. The page lists locations, hours, and an Access Discount Program that offers 25, 50, 75, or 90 percent off program fees for Portland residents, with no proof of income required.

What the page does not list is a public policy on posting community artwork or flyers. That is not a criticism. It is just a fact. If you want to know whether your neighborhood community center will hang your poster, you have to ask them. The city code has a Title 4 for Original Art Murals, which is a different thing entirely and mostly about large-scale murals on private buildings. It does not cover the fridge.

So the fridge is its own jurisdiction. The bike shop owner decides. The volunteers decide. The person who empties the compost bin decides. There is no permit. There is no fee. There is also no contract, which is the part I keep circling back to.

The emotional math

Here is the thing I have not said yet. When the community center asked for the PDF, I felt two things at once. The first was flattery. Someone saw my drawing and wanted it. That is the whole job, more or less. The second was a small drop in my stomach, because I knew I was about to give something away and I did not know what it was worth.

I have been freelancing for eleven years. I still do this. I still say yes before I know what I am saying yes to. I still confuse being generous with being available. I still treat the fact that I drew something for free as evidence that it has no value, which is backwards. The free poster is the reason they asked. The free poster is the marketing. The free poster is not the problem.

The problem is that I did not have a sentence ready. I did not have a small, repeatable ritual for the moment when someone asks for the file. I had a feeling, and the feeling was: don’t be weird about this.

So I sent the PDF. And then I sat in my kitchen and thought about it for twenty minutes. And then I wrote this, which is the ritual, I guess. Writing it down so next time I have the sentence ready.

The sentence I am practicing

Here it is, in case you need one too:

Happy to share. Here is a screen-resolution PDF for [specific use] by [specific organization] for [specific time period]. Credit as [your name]. If you need a print-ready file or a different use, let me know and I will send a quote.

That is it. Four sentences. It is not a contract. It is not a lawyer. It is just a small, repeatable ritual that keeps me from giving away the recipe when someone asks for a slice of bread.

The poster is still on the fridge. I walked past it yesterday. It is a little wrinkled from the rain, and someone has drawn a small heart next to the phone number in ballpoint pen. That is the part that matters. That is the part I would do again for free.

The PDF is a different thing. The PDF has a license. The PDF has a scope. The PDF is the part I am still learning to name.

FAQ

Do I own the copyright to a drawing I made for free?

Yes, unless you signed something that says otherwise. The U.S. Copyright Office states that copyright protection exists automatically from the moment an original work is fixed in a tangible medium, and that the copyright initially belongs to the author who created the work. Giving someone a copy of your drawing does not transfer the copyright. A transfer generally must be in writing and signed by the owner.

What is the difference between a proof PDF and a print-ready PDF?

A proof PDF is usually lower resolution, often RGB, and meant for screen viewing or review. A print-ready PDF is usually higher resolution, often CMYK, sized to the final print dimensions, and may include bleeds and crop marks. The two files serve different purposes and are not interchangeable.

Do I need to register my illustration with the Copyright Office?

No. Registration is not required for copyright to exist. However, the Copyright Office notes that for U.S. works, registration or refusal is necessary before you can file an infringement lawsuit, and that registering before or within three months of publication can make you eligible for statutory damages and attorneys’ fees.

How does the IRS treat small freelance illustration income?

If you carry on a trade or business as a sole proprietor or independent contractor, you are self-employed for tax purposes. IRS Publication 334 states that you do not have to work full-time for this to apply, and that a part-time business counts. Self-employment income is generally subject to self-employment tax, which covers Social Security and Medicare.

Does Portland have a city policy on posting community artwork in community centers?

Portland Parks & Recreation operates nine community centers and two arts centers, but the bureau’s community centers page does not list a public policy on posting community flyers or artwork. Portland City Code Title 4 covers Original Art Murals, which is a separate category. For specific posting questions, contact the individual community center.