Art Theft or Friendship

A close friend of mine (I’m not putting her name/dA on here so I’m just going to refer to her as Kelly) had been stealing art on deviantart for about a year.  I had always been better than her in art and I feel like that may have motivated her to steal.  I had met her in 4th grade and in 8th grade we went to different high schools.  That’s when we both got a deviantart account so we could still keep in touch.  After a while she began posting art and none of them looked like what I was used to seeing her draw.  I originally though she had improved immensely and I began getting a little jealous.  Then she started posting more and more drawings and they all varied both stylistically and media-wise.  First it would be digital, then a pencil sketch, and maybe some markers.  That’s when I noticed something was up.  In a lot of her drawings, you could see a bright white blob in the corners of some of her pictures (where a signiture was obviously erased).  When I noticed this I asked her about it and she said she couldn’t see it, so I googled some of her pictures. I found a lot of them on other websites and other deviantart accounts and this is when I lost it.  I didn’t want to report her (1) becasue I wanted to try to get her to stop and (2) I didn’t want to lose our friendship.  If a stolen drawing was on deviantart, I made sure to add them to my favorites and invited her over the next weekend.  At my house, I showed her all the original drawings and she still denied it, saying that they stole her art.  I kept trying to get her to stop by asking her to do a speedpaint on youtube or redraw one of the drawings that she claims she drew.  After a while she stopped stealing for a while but after a few months she started again and I lost so much trust in her.  She no longer steals art but I feel like the memory of this will always stay in my mind.  I feel like, even now, I can’t completely trust her no matter how much I want to.

-Anonymous