Illustrator Raymond Biesinger's self-defence guide against getting ripped off

Raymond Biesinger is either unlucky or typical, depending on how you look at it: The illustrator has been ripped off nine times since 2005. He kept track of every instance, whether it was a payment that almost cost him a rent payment or a design studio that copied his illustration in the New Yorker for a Hungarian anti-gambling campaign.

On March 1, 2023, at 3:51 PM, he hung up on someone for the first time in his life. On the other end of the call were a vice-president and content director from what he describes as "the continent's largest urban innovation hub"—a publicly-funded nonprofit sitting on 1.5 million square feet of valuable real estate, housing venture capitalists and AI startups. They'd used his illustration of women's anatomy on their online magazine for 1,005 days. When he noticed, they offered him $2,000 and an NDA.

He asked for $20,000. They said no. He said he'd publish a pamphlet called 8 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off and make more money from that than from their settlement offer.

They eventually settled for $2,000 without the NDA, and that pamphlet became 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off (Drawn & Quarterly, 2025), a book that reads like a war report from the frontlines of creative labour.

In reality, it is a memoir, a self-defence manual, and archive of systemic failure where each chapter doubles as a case study in self-defence tactics—bluffing, documentation, weaponizing inconvenience—for when a legal system is out of reach, too expensive, and too slow to be useful for most independent creatives.

"I think we live under capitalism," he says from the desk of his Verdun studio, "so why don't I make something I like that other people can like as well?"

There's no romanticism about being a starving artist or pretending money doesn't matter when you have a mortgage and need dental surgery.

"Deep poverty"

A self-taught artist with no art school education, Biesinger has what he calls his a "minimalist maximalist" approach—simple shapes, obsessively repeated, densely filling a form—that's become a distinct style born from necessity, not theory. He never planned on being an illustrator, having studied political history at the University of Alberta, got a degree in European and North American politics.

Around 2002, the student newspaper needed comics drawn on short notice. He volunteered. "I really wanted to be arts and entertainment editor," he says. "I applied for the job and got rejected... so I was like, 'Fuck this, I'm gonna go make some real money drawing pictures.'"

He took his house party invitations and show posters printed cheap at the university print shop and sent them to every major Canadian publication he could think of. "They all hired me," he says. "I realized I could spend a night using the student newspaper's computers and make an illustration that would get me paid $500, or I could go to journalism school and compete with all these brilliant writers who are smarter than me."

By graduation in 2004, he had clients. He also had what Statistics Canada classified as "deep poverty." From May to September that year, as a full-time illustrator, he made $950 one month, $250 the next, then $755, $505, $350.

He stocked shelves at a shoe shop for eight months, working whatever hours he needed, checking e-mail between shipments, leaving at a moment's notice when illustration work came in. By May 2005 he could quit. He was making an average of $1,200 a month. Progress.

That's when a show promoter commissioned an 11×17 poster for $50, then refused to pay. $50 isn't normally worth a fight, but for Biesinger in 2005, it was rent. He sent an e-mail threatening to involve a collection agency—a bluff, since he had no idea how collection agencies worked. The $50 arrived by courier that Friday.

This small victory that taught him something crucial: when the legal system won't help you, you pretend you have access to power you don't actually have. You invent authority figures, and make someone believe the consequences will be worse than just paying you.

Over the next fifteen years, his client list grew to include the New Yorker, Monocle, the Guardian, Time, GQ, and he refined these survival skills.

Fit for print

Biesinger moved to Montreal from Edmonton in 2010. The oil boom was pricing everyone out, and his wife's clothing shop had to close. "We decided between Vancouver and here," he says. "The Olympics had just happened in Vancouver and we felt like there's no way we could compete with all the money from retirees going in there."

Montreal turned out to be exactly the right choice. His landlord was a professional kite maker, which reassured him in his artistic pursuits. "Montreal was very much a print city," he says. "Everyone had $40 to $80 in their pocket earmarked for a 12-by-18 print."

In wealthier times and places, people dreamed of owning oil paintings. In Montreal, they bought affordable prints from local artists at at indie craft fairs and backyard sales. Biesinger started working with printmakers, learning to silkscreen until he bought a large-format printer that lets him print on demand.

"It's one thing to flush $1,500 down the toilet on prints nobody wants," he says. "This way there's no risk involved, which lets me do more of what I want."

His Canadian Cities series—ten different 24-inch square prints showing cities at specific historical moments—has sold in the hundreds or thousands per design. "They bought me a root canal," he says.

This matters because the editorial world has since collapsed. "I used to get 95% of my work from commissions," he says. "Now it's about 25%. Magazines and newspapers are having a hard enough time paying for journalists. They certainly don't have a budget for illustrators."

Montreal's print scene became his economic infrastructure exactly when he needed it. But the city gave him something else: community as mutual aid. People watched for rip-offs and flagged them to each other.

When a small agency sold full usage rights of Biesinger's work to a government client despite only purchasing limited rights from him, he only knew because a designer friend was freelancing for that client and noticed. She called him immediately. The agency had spent a year lying to the government about having those rights. When caught, they paid Biesinger the remaining $4,000 without much fight.

8 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off

Back to that nonprofit confrontation mentioned at the top of this story: That was the culmination of nearly two decades of learning how to defend himself.

Over that month of heated negotiations, Biesinger employed every tactic he'd developed: peacocking online before calls, posting about joining the association Illustration Québec, linking to his La Presse feature, mentioning lawyers he didn't actually have. He would later admit in 9 Times he had no such lawyer, only looked one up for credibility.

He also weaponized inconvenience. "Every time they responded, they had to have another internal meeting," he explains. "Those meetings cost money—everyone's salary, the legal team's billable hours. I dragged my feet, asked for more information, made excuses for more phone calls. Giving me what I wanted might seem expensive, but as time went on they might realize it'd be cheaper than endlessly analyzing proposals."

When he posted a pamphlet mock-up online detailing 8 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, there was demand. Other illustrators, designers, photographers all wanted it.

"I realized I actually have a lot of documents to back up all the times I've been ripped off," he says. "And maybe this will be useful for lots of people."

Not every story ends with settlements or anger. He recounts a blog reader who'd asked him about finding an illustration style. Biesinger wrote back about digging into your life, your family history, your quirks—don't just copy your heroes. Six months later, the reader's website was full of Biesinger knock-offs. Raymond sent what he describes in the book as "the biggest fuck you e-mail I'd ever written in my life."

For the book, he tracked the guy down. Time had changed things—the reader now had his own distinct style, was winning awards, working with major outlets. And both of them had been using that confrontation as a teaching tool for years, from opposite perspectives.

"Being harsh doesn't have to be a force for negativity," Biesinger says. "You learned a lesson, I learned a lesson, the reader learns a lesson."

The book's core argument is that for small-scale creative theft, the legal system offers little recourse. Copyright lawyers are expensive. Small claims courts have jurisdiction problems. "We're often living month-to-month," he says, "and receiving a payment can often be a year too late."

While admittedly imperfect, Biesinger's solution requires documentation, nerve, and a willingness to bluff when the alternative is getting ripped off and taking it.

The tenth rip-off

There's one occasion Biesinger's book can't address. After checking haveibeentrained.com—a site that shows if your work has been scraped into AI training datasets—he found 216 of his images. "I've already been forced to be their unpaid co-worker," he says.

His response has been to make what he calls "AI-proof" work. His Great Plains Queer print, created with historian Steacy Easton, is densely text-heavy with tiny captions about prairie queer history that isn't heavily documented online. "AI can't handle text-in-image overlap well," he explains. "It invents stuff and won't admit it's wrong. And the subject matter isn't in training datasets."

The print is also built on multiple metaphors—a woman as a geographic map, filled with tiny vignettes that each need context. "To get a singular image, AI can do that with some competency," he says. "But when it starts getting into these complex areas that need to make sense but also combine three or four concepts, stuff gets crazy."

He's cautiously optimistic that the AI boom will follow previous tech bubbles—lots of hype, some specialized uses, but not the revolution it's being sold as. "MIT Business Review just released a report showing 95% of corporate attempts to integrate AI into their work have been met with failure," he says. "Even the Economist is reporting about AI project failure rates."

The economics don't make sense either. "The real costs of AI in terms of hardware and power expenses aren't being expressed in the current cost. It's all free because they're hoping we get hooked. But when query costs go to actual price? Are you ready to pay $500 a month for a subscription? Only very specialized businesses are going to be interested in that."

Still, he's thinking about a follow-up book focused entirely on tech companies and creative survival. Something along the lines of Big Tech, Little Creatives: How Can We Survive This Bullshit?

"That would be a very different book. It wouldn't be nearly as based upon my own experience because my experiences are limited. But I think it would be a really good complement to what I've done here."

"Just me and this desk."

Biesinger admits that initial interviews for his book were awkward "because I hadn't really dealt with (talking about) the subject matter." It was only when Steven Heller called, a household name of the illustration world for his status as a progenitor of many high-profile design careers and author of decades of books on design theory.

But even in that conversation, the gap between establishment illustration discourse and Biesinger's concerns became clear. Heller wanted to discuss aesthetics and style rip-offs—the traditional territory of design criticism. But for Biesinger, "it's all about labour and working conditions."

That tension captures what makes the book unusual. Heller hasn't had to negotiate with a deadbeat client over $50 in rent money in seventy years. But for working illustrators, designers, photographers living month-to-month and juggling mortgages and kids and dental surgery bills, these are questions of survival, not abstract ones about artistic originality.

"Because of the sheer amount of time I spend alone in this room, my default is to assume I'm working alone," he says. "Then I'll do events and there's such a wonderful turnout and I'm reminded that I'm part of something. I'll have this little high from that for a week or so, and then I'll go back to just me and this desk."

He knows he'll be back at the desk—his grandfather's desk, complete with cigar burns from when he fell asleep there—drawing and researching and documenting. It is in many ways the same way he started in 2002: back to square one, self-taught, with only resolve and compulsive note-taking between him and a family to support.

The difference now is that those notes might help others survive what he's survived. "I didn't want to pretend I had all the answers," he says. "But I felt that if I included all the information, creative people could find ways to use it." They can decide they either have these skills already, or try a different tactic from Biesinger's playbook.

Back when he nearly lost $50, Biesinger reflects in his book that "there is no design-oriented 911 for us to call, no photo police for us to hail, or no affordable illustration courts for us to try our luck with. Our work is not a Benin bronze or Elgin marble—the United Nations won't be taking up our cause any time soon. All too often, the legal system is floating high above us, uselessly out of reach. In its absence, we need to get creative."

Apologies to Biesinger for not being creative enough to come up with a better final word on this story—there isn't one, in my opinion. The book says it all.