I get asked about this more than I expected. Someone finds a sketch, a manga panel, a character design from one of my projects, and wants to know if they can use it. This page is the practical answer. The legal foundation lives on the Absolutely Skint image license page — go there if you need the full CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 breakdown. This page is about absolutely skint image usage in practice: what the format looks like, what's fine, what isn't, and what to do if you're not sure.
Absolutely Skint Image Usage: The Short Version
If your use is personal, educational, or non-commercial, you're almost certainly fine. Share it, remix it, put it in a video essay, use it in your fan project. The license lets you do all of that. The one thing I ask for in return is a credit.
If you're making money from it in any way, come and ask me first. That's the whole rule.
How to Credit Me (Copy This Format)
The **CC BY-NC-SA 4.0** license requires attribution. I'm not going to send anyone a cease and desist over a wonky credit line, but I do want to be named. Here's what a correct credit looks like:
Art by Pistol Taeja / absolutelyskint.com — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
That's it. You can adapt the wording slightly as long as the three parts are there: my name, a link back to this site (or the specific post), and the license name. If you adapted or changed the image rather than just sharing it, add "adapted from" to the front:
Adapted from Pistol Taeja / absolutelyskint.com — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Where to put the credit depends on the format. Under an image works. In a credits section at the bottom of a post works. In a video description works. The idea is that someone who sees the image can find their way back to the source without having to do detective work.
If you're not sure whether your platform even supports links, just write out the URL. `absolutelyskint.com` is short enough that it works as plain text too.
What You Can Do Without Asking
Under the license, these are all fine as long as you credit me and keep it non-commercial:
- Share unmodified images — repost a sketch on your blog, include a panel from one of my manga projects in a roundup, use concept art in a YouTube video. All good.
- Remix and adapt — use my art as a reference, draw something inspired by it, incorporate it into a collage or fan project. You just need to note what you changed and release your version under the same CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
- Use it in educational contexts — a student presentation, a design course example, a YouTube essay about indie game art. Non-commercial educational use is exactly what this license is built for.
- Use it in personal projects — a private Discord server, a fanzine with no ticket price, a passion project that isn't generating revenue. Yes.
The images this applies to are original works I've created and published on this site. That means concept art and character sketches from my games — P For Pistol, Pan Airways, GRILLFRIENDS, Enemy of the State, A Boy Named Dorothy — plus manga panels, storyboard images, and original illustrations I've made myself.
What You Cannot Do Without Asking First
- Commercial use of any kind — selling prints, merchandise, or products that feature my art. Using it in sponsored content or paid advertising. Putting it inside a paid app or game. Licensing it on to someone else. Any of this requires my explicit permission before you do it.
- Feeding it into AI or machine learning models — I do not give permission for my images to be used as training data for any AI, ML, or generative model. This applies whether you're building the model yourself or submitting to a dataset someone else is building. If you have a specific reason to ask, contact me on Twitter, but the default answer is no.
- Applying a more restrictive license to adaptations — if you make something based on my work, you have to release it under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 as well. You can't lock down a derivative with a stricter license.
- Implying I endorse you or your project — using my art doesn't mean I'm backing your opinions, your brand, or your business. Just make sure it's clear we're not affiliated unless we actually are.
What Is and Isn't Covered
This only covers original work made by me, Pistol Taeja. It does not cover:
- Screenshots from commercial games I don't own the IP for
- Stock images or third-party assets I've licensed in from elsewhere
- Art commissioned from collaborators — their own terms apply, and I'll note where relevant when that's the case
If you find an image on this site and you're not sure whether it's mine to license, assume it isn't until you've confirmed. I'd rather you ask than assume.
Commercial Use and Everything Else: Just Ask
I'm a solo developer, not a legal department. If you want to use something commercially — say, you're creating a YouTube channel where ads run, or you want a piece of P For Pistol concept art for a podcast thumbnail on a monetised show — just reach out to me on Twitter. Most of the time the answer is yes, I just want to know about it and make sure I'm credited.
The same goes for anything edge-case I haven't covered here. If you've read this page and still aren't sure, ask. I don't bite. I'm just one person trying to keep my work properly credited while also not making this unnecessarily difficult for people who want to share it.
For anyone interested in how I think about image attribution from an SEO angle and why it actually matters for indie developers, I wrote about it in my post on indie game developer SEO — the image indexing section is relevant here.
Conclusion
Credit me, keep it non-commercial, and we're good. Anything outside that, ask before you publish.
If any of the work on this site has caught your eye, it probably came from one of my active projects. Check out P For Pistol if you want to see what I'm currently building.
