The fan-art IP gray area: what we paint, what we don't, what stays personal

Eitan emailed me on a Friday in April with a question I get in about one in five fan-art conversations: "If I commission a painting of my favourite Witcher character from you, can I sell prints of it later?" The honest answer is no — and the longer answer is the conversation this whole piece is about. Fan-art commissions sit in a real gray area, the studio has a position on it, and the position is worth stating plainly so nobody is surprised three months after the painting ships.

I'm Hector. I run Design Vortex, and a meaningful chunk of the studio's character work is fan art — Tarnished, Hunter, Geralt, Master Chief, V, Strahd, a Genshin character, a Honkai character, a Witcher villain. We paint these. We love painting these. And every one of them comes with the same conversation about what the client can and cannot do with the resulting painting. This piece is that conversation, in writing, in my voice, so it's there to point at next time the question comes up.

If you've landed here from the wider souls and anime fan-art commission guide or the Genshin and Honkai commissions piece, you're in the right place. This is the IP companion to both.

Table of contents

• The gray area, in plain English
• Personal-use fan art: where we paint freely
• Commercial-resale fan art: where we don't
• The cease-and-desist conversation, in plain terms
• Studio policy: what's in the order confirmation
• How OC-in-someone-else's-style fits
• Common misunderstandings I correct in email
• Where to take it next

The gray area, in plain English

The legal phrase is "fair use" in the United States, "fair dealing" in the UK, and there are roughly parallel doctrines in most other jurisdictions. None of them give you, the commissioner, a clean green light to do whatever you want with a painting of a copyrighted character. What they give you is a wobbly, fact-specific defence that depends on what the painting is for, who's making money from it, and how transformative the work is.

What this looks like in real conversations:

• Painting your favourite character for your own wall, your phone wallpaper, your personal page on a site nobody monetises — broadly fine in practice. Studios and rights holders do not pursue this kind of personal use, and the fan-art ecosystem for almost every major IP is built on this assumption.
• Painting your favourite character and selling 500 prints at a convention — not fine. This is the boundary that gets cease-and-desist letters, and it's a boundary the studio respects on its end as a matter of policy.
• Painting your favourite character and using it as the cover of a self-published novel you sell on Amazon — also not fine, and it's the kind of use that has cost people their book listings.
• Painting your OC in the style of a copyrighted property — different question entirely, and we'll cover that further down.

The reason this is gray and not black-and-white is that rights holders apply their policies inconsistently. Some are aggressive (Disney, Nintendo, Games Workshop, historically). Some are permissive in practice (HoYoverse with fan art, FromSoftware with Souls fan content, CD Projekt Red with Witcher fan work). None of them have signed a contract with you saying personal-use fan art is fine forever. The cultural norm is one thing; the legal floor is another. The studio operates on both.

Personal-use fan art: where we paint freely

The vast majority of fan-art commissions we take on are personal-use, and we treat them as fair-use transformative work — an original studio painting that depicts a recognisable character. We paint these without hesitation. The painting itself is our craft. The recognisable character is the subject.

What personal-use means in practice:

• Your wall. Framed, hung, looked at. Yours.
• Your screen. Phone wallpaper, laptop background, a Discord avatar for a non-monetised personal account.
• A small print for your own use — a single A4 print, an A3 print on a wall, three prints because you wanted one for the office and one for home. We don't audit this and we don't expect to.
• A non-monetised social post showing the painting because you like it. We ask that you tag the studio if you do, and that you don't crop our signature off, but the post itself is not a problem.

What personal-use does not include:

• A run of prints sold on Etsy.
• The painting on merchandise — mugs, T-shirts, stickers — sold anywhere.
• The painting used as a book cover, a stream overlay you monetise, a brand asset for a business.
• NFT minting, blockchain distribution, any token-based resale.

Kestrel commissioned a Geralt portrait from us in February — beautiful brief, came in tight, came in opinionated, the painting is on her wall and on her partner's phone as a wallpaper. That's a personal-use commission, that's exactly the use we license, and that's the most common version of the conversation.

Personal-use fan art is the easiest version of this conversation. The painting is yours, the character isn't, and the wall doesn't care.

Commercial-resale fan art: where we don't

The studio does not take on fan-art commissions intended for commercial resale. This isn't a flexible policy and it's not a price-negotiation thing — there isn't a higher-tier rate that opens the door. The answer is just no.

The reason is twofold and worth stating plainly:

• The rights aren't ours to grant. The studio cannot give you commercial rights to a Geralt painting because we don't own Geralt. CD Projekt Red does. We'd be promising something we don't have, and that promise wouldn't protect you when the cease-and-desist letter arrives.
• The studio's name goes on the painting. If a print run of Geralt portraits painted by us shows up on Etsy with our signature in the corner, we share in the legal exposure. We do not want to be the test case for whether transformative commentary covers a 500-print convention table.

If you have a project that needs commercial rights — a book cover, a product, a merch line, a stream overlay you monetise — the cleanest path is to commission an original character. The custom projects service page covers the studio's commercial work. The commercial licensing piece is the longer version of how commercial commissions are scoped and priced. Both are routes we take all the time. The fan-art route, for commercial purposes, isn't.

The cease-and-desist conversation, in plain terms

Rights holders enforce their IP unevenly, and that unevenness is what produces the gray area in the first place. A working summary of how enforcement actually moves in practice:

• High-volume small personal use — almost never enforced. The cost of pursuing a 50-print Etsy seller is high relative to the revenue protected, and it's bad PR for the rights holder.
• Moderate-volume commercial use — sometimes enforced, often via takedown rather than legal action. Etsy shops, Redbubble pages, and Amazon merch listings get pulled. The artist or commissioner loses the listing; sometimes they lose the account.
• High-visibility commercial use — much more likely to be enforced legally. A book cover on a self-published novel that hits a bestseller list, a viral T-shirt that gets press, an NFT collection — these draw cease-and-desist letters and sometimes lawsuits.
• Use that crosses into trademark, not just copyright — almost always enforced. Using a character on packaging that looks like official packaging, on a logo, in a way that suggests endorsement, gets pursued faster than parallel copyright issues.

The studio's posture is to stay well clear of the second and third categories on our end. Personal-use fan-art commissions sit in the first category, and that's where we paint. The conversation I have with clients is to make sure their intended use sits there too.

Helene asked me in December about commissioning a Strahd portrait and then printing it on the cover of a fan-zine she was selling at a small convention. Twenty copies, $5 each. We said no — not because $100 of zine revenue is going to bring down Wizards of the Coast's legal department, but because the painting would go out into the world as a print, with our signature, attached to a sale. The line is clear on our end, even when the practical risk is low. The Curse of Strahd NPC pack piece walks through the personal-use version of that same commission.

Studio policy: what's in the order confirmation

When a fan-art commission comes through the order form, the order confirmation includes a short paragraph that says, in plain language: the painting is licensed to you for personal use; the studio retains the right to use the painting in our portfolio and on social media; commercial resale rights are not granted; we recommend you treat the painting as a personal asset rather than a commercial one. That paragraph is there so the conversation is on the record. If anything ambiguous comes up after delivery — somebody asks you about prints, somebody wants to license the image — point them back at that paragraph and at this article.

What the order confirmation also says:

• High-resolution file delivery is included. You get the print file. We trust you'll use it within the personal-use frame above.
• Signature stays on the canvas. We don't deliver unsigned files. The painting is identifiable as ours and that matters to us.
• Studio portfolio rights. The painting can show up in the portfolio, on our Instagram, on our process posts. We don't tag the commissioner without permission.
• Painting hands over. The physical painting, if there is one, is yours. The copyright in the painting stays with the studio, which is standard for commissioned art.

The commercial licensing piece covers what changes when commercial rights are part of the commission — different scope, different price, different paperwork. The character art commission pricing piece has the actual numbers for both routes.

How OC-in-someone-else's-style fits

The most common fan-art-adjacent commission is not actually fan art in the strict sense — it's an original character painted in the visual style of a copyrighted property. "My OC in the Genshin style." "My Tarnished in the Souls register." "My V analogue in the Cyberpunk 2077 look."

These commissions occupy a different IP position. The character is yours. The visual style is the studio's interpretation of the canonical visual language of the property. Visual style, in copyright terms, is much harder to own than a specific character. You cannot stop someone from painting in your style.

What this means in practice:

• The character is fully yours. Commercial rights to the character, the design, the painting are negotiable in the way any custom-commission commercial rights are.
• The style is referenced, not copied. We're painting a HoYoverse-influenced register, not reproducing a specific HoYoverse character.
• The painting is generally safe for commercial use — book cover, stream overlay, merch — provided no specific copyrighted character or trademark is incorporated.

The fan art versus original character piece walks through the decision matrix in detail. The short version is that the OC-in-someone-else's-style brief unlocks a commercial path that the canon-character brief doesn't. If you have a commercial use in mind, the OC route is almost always the right one.

Jonas asked in March for his Tarnished OC — entirely his own character, his own backstory, painted in the Elden Ring register — and we were able to deliver the painting with commercial rights included. That's a different paperwork pathway from a canon Malenia portrait. Same painting register; different IP position. The Tarnished OC piece is the long version of that brief.

Common misunderstandings I correct in email

A short list of the wrong assumptions I most often hear, and what's actually true:

• "If I commissioned it, I own the painting outright." Half-true. You own the physical painting (if delivered as such) and a personal-use licence to the image. The copyright in the work stays with the studio. This is standard for commissioned art and matches industry norms.
• "If I bought a high-res file, I can print as many as I want." For personal use, in practice, yes — three prints, ten prints, nobody is auditing this. For a commercial print run, no, and the answer doesn't change with file resolution.
• "Fan art is free speech." Fair-use commentary is protected, and we paint in that tradition. That protection is fact-specific and it's not absolute. Selling prints of a copyrighted character is not the same as commenting on it.
• "HoYoverse / FromSoftware / CD Projekt Red allow fan art." They allow personal-use fan art in practice. None of them have a written commercial-resale licence for fan art. The personal-use tolerance does not extend to commercial resale.
• "My fan zine is non-commercial because the print run is small." A small print run is still a print run. The legal question is whether the work is being distributed for money or in commerce, not how many copies were sold.

I'd rather have all of this conversation in the first email exchange than three months after delivery. The order form includes a short usage question for exactly this reason.

Where to take it next

If you've got a fan-art commission in mind and the personal-use frame above suits your project, the order form is the right next step — please name the IP in the brief so we can flag the personal-use frame in the confirmation email. The portfolio has fan-art examples across genres; spending time there tells you faster than another email which register you actually want.

If your project needs commercial rights, the custom projects service page is the right route — the OC-in-someone-else's-style brief is the most common bridge there, and the fan art versus original character piece is the decision-matrix piece. The commercial licensing piece has the full version of what changes when commercial use is on the table, and the character art commission pricing piece has the numbers.

For genre-specific deeper reads, the Genshin and Honkai commissions piece covers HoYoverse IP specifically, the souls-style character art commission piece covers FromSoftware territory, the anime portrait commission guide covers the wider anime register, the Geralt of Rivia portrait piece and the Malenia portrait piece cover specific canon-character briefs, and the cyberpunk character commission guide covers the V parallel. All four genres run into the same IP conversation in slightly different ways.

The shortest version of the studio's position is the one I told Eitan: personal-use, yes; commercial-resale of a copyrighted character, no; OC in a style, mostly yes with the right paperwork. Knowing which lane your project sits in saves the difficult email three months from now.