POSH PETS art dilemma

Last time I mentioned that I had found an artist on fiverr to do the POSH PETS NFTs, well, turns out it wasn't much of an artist but more of someone tracing images and turning them into vector drawings. Of course this wasn't mentioned anywhere on his profile and the reviews were generally well all over his page, but I was expecting that he'd at least draw them himself even with references. I'm not up to speed these days on apps that exist that can make it easier to do this but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some sort of tools that you can just run an image through and it would turn them into the final product after some touches in the end I suppose.

Now this makes it harder to decide on what to do next as I can't just feed him references of different breeds and pets from the internet as they'd be exact copies. Meaning that if @poshtoken were to sell these, even if I don't profit from it directly myself it would still mean that someone's image of their pet is being sold for profit without permission. Luckily the "test" image I used at first was of @hiddenblade's golden retriever.

Reference:

_{Image credit: @hiddenblade}

Result:

I haven't accepted the delivery yet but as it wasn't that costly I'm just going to go ahead and do so as I can't be bothered explaining that I wasn't expecting it to be traced. This wasn't the only image so I'm not just assuming, the other was spot on similar as well as these two examples.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against them being traced per se, I like the outcome and I think this style would be nice for POSH PETS first NFT drop. I just won't have enough images for all the breeds and references I'd want included that I own myself or have asked permission for to be used for the NFT idea.

So my options now are these, and I'd appreciate the communities input on how to move forward next:

1. Find an artist who's more expensive but illustrates and draws them in a similar style himself, meaning no tracing or straight copying from others images and pets.

2. Find an artist on Hive would can trace similarly to this fiverr artist. Then ask Hivers if they would be open to share their favorite pictures of their pets to be used for the POSH PETS NFT. This could also be a great idea cause if your picture is chosen you'd have your pet as an NFT in many different forms and variants existing on the Hive blockchain forever, but since it's a community project I'd rather not offer royalties or something like that for the pets that would be traced into vector art like the example above. Unless of course the community prefers that then I could take it into account. The reason I'd rather want an artist on Hive who could do this instead of paying the above artist on Fiverr is that I don't think this is something that requires a lot of work so why not pay someone on Hive who has the same skills rather than someone outside who I thought was an artist and wouldn't just trace them.

Either way, let me know what you think.

• Find an artist who's more expensive and draws them from scratch.

or

• Wait for an artist on Hive who can trace images from Hivers into the same style.

I personally like the second idea more to be honest, maybe for future drops we can do something more artistic/cartoonish/etc but the realistic looking one looks pretty cool in my opinion for the alpha drop.

Let me know what you think, though!

PS! Payment would occur through @poshtoken to keep it nonprofit, though I wouldn't mind fronting the liquids to pay the artist instantly until the account has gathered more itself.

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