Please read the following instructions carefully before submitting any content to our website. Pay special attention to the following sections: Crediting Sources and Author Agreement. It also might be useful to check out other authors’ content already published on our website (use the Search to look for other items related to your topic, and find out whether your idea has already been discovered by someone else). Surely, we are happy to see new concepts and techniques discussed at out site.

You are welcome to submit your cg tutorials, (including video tutorials), how-tos, quick tips, etc. Please note that you must follow the specific submission instructions for each type of content.

Topics we are interested in

Our authors have published many articles and tutorials on a wide range of topics, such as modeling, texturing, rendering, animation, rigging, compositing, visual effects, and so on. They described the use of video software, including Photoshop, Paint and others. If your piece, be it simple or complex, is about something of the above-mentioned, it’s probably worth submitting it to us.

If you are not sure whether your article is suitable for out website, please contact us and we’ll do our best to help you clarify that.

Getting paid for your tutorials and making ofs

Please keep in mind that we do not accept any content that doesn’t meet our strict standards. If your articles are approved for publishing, you’ll be paid an agreed price for each item. The payment will be effected within the first week of the next month from the moment of publication. We only pay our authors via PayPal, so you must have a PayPal account.

Getting famous

Surely, you know that fame is another name for success, and writing articles sometimes can help you become more well-known. When your content is published on our website, some readers might want to view your profile, so please add a brief text about yourself, in addition to your website address and e-mail, when submitting your articles. Example below:

Make a good tutorial, and thousands of artists will view it, and many of them will probably visit your website. What’s even more important, that may also bring some prospective customers to your site!

Important notes about submitting content

1. You may only submit your original work.
2. You may not submit anything that has already been published somewhere else.
3. Format your articles following the guidelines on the respective content type (see below).
4. We reserve the right to edit any articles submitted to us.
5. We reserve the right to reject any articles. Therefore, if you are not sure whether your article or tutorial is suitable for our website, please contact us beforehand, and we’ll try to help you to clarify that.

Submitting your content

Writing tutorials

We strongly encourage our authors to make comprehensive tutorials, ready for practical use by professionals and good for creating high-quality artwork. Please submit tutorials that have an introduction and consist of at least 25 steps, and add an image for each step (see example).

When submitting a tutorial, include the following:

• HTML file containing the text of the tutorial. (Click here to download a sample HTML file.)
• Images illustrating each step. (Please keep each image’s width within 640 pixels; this limitation doesn’t apply to the finished artwork if you use it as an illustration.)
• Source files. (They’ll be made available for download by our members only.)

Before packing your tutorial into an archive for sending, please put the HTML file, all images, and all source files into one folder.
If your source files include any images, we strongly recommend you to see the section Crediting Sources, and especially its subsection Source Content.

Recording Video Tutorials

Video tutorials are a great source of information because they let your audience see what and how you are doing. We strongly encourage our authors to make comprehensive tutorials, ready for practical use by professionals and good for creating high-quality artwork. Make sure that the picture and the sound are of high quality (see examples). Please note that we accept only unique video tutorials, so don’t bother remaking any existing ones or making video tutorials based on any existing written ones.

Important notes about submitting video tutorials

1. Begin the tutorial with a brief introduction of yourself, where you are saying that it has been created exclusively for our website.
2. Your video’s duration must be at least 15 minutes.
3. Submit video in the MP4 format, in high definition: 960 X 720 pixels (4:3) minimum.
4. Include a brief description of your tutorial.
5. Include the finished artwork. (Please keep the image width within 640 pixels.)
6. Include a screenshot of your video to let your audience have a preview.

Making quick tips

At times you may want to share with others some tips and tricks that are too simple for a full-blown tutorial but still might be interesting to our community. In this case, you are welcome to submit your “quick tips” — small articles, short tutorials of up to 10 steps, or brief screencasts.

We publish a lot of quick tips every week, and we surely pay for them!

Video tutorials, screencasts: For more information on how to make a video tutorial, see the Video Tutorials section. Quick-tip screencasts are similar to full-length video tutorials but less extensive, usually limited to a few minutes.

Written tutorials: For more information on how to make a written tutorial, see the Written Tutorials section. Quick-tip tutorials are similar to full-length written tutorials but less extensive, usually limited to a few steps.

Submitting freebiesYou are welcome to submit your texture packages, rigs, and scripts to our Freebies section. We guess it’s an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your artwork and thus get more well-known to our community. Remember to provide your bio for your Profile, and get ready for your fifteen minutes of fame!

How to submit ready tutorials or making of’s?

Please e-mail your ready-to-publish tutorials to painting@dtuts.com

Credit your sources

Always credit all your sources: Doing that not both shows that you don’t misappropriate anyone’s ideas and helps our associates to make sure that your tutorial is eligible for publishing.

Please do your best not to plagiarize, even unwittingly! Alas, it’s so easy to break copyright laws nowadays, sometimes with heavy consequences. Be on the safe side and make sure that you do not present someone else’s original ideas as your own!

Using photos and other artwork as source images

Some authors easily use someone else’s photos in their tutorials without even thinking that by doing that they may be violating the implicit copyright. Please follow our recommendations:

• You can freely use any photos you have taken yourself.
• Do not simply use any images found online, as some of them may be under copyright!
• Do not use images found on Flickr; the only exception is images distributed under a Creative Commons License for Commercial Use (you can use Flickr’s Advanced Search to find such images), and remember to provide a link to Flickr’s page where you’ve found the respective images.
• Do not use images from free photo stocks like StockVault.net just because they are “free”, but make sure to check the distribution files for the usage agreement first! Keep in mind that sometimes you need to get the photographer’s permission (which you’ll have to forward to us, as otherwise we will not put such an image on our website).
• You can use images bought from photo stocks like iStockPhoto, provided that you put a watermark on each image exactly as it’s done at the stock sites. By doing that, you are ensuring that the original photos are not distributed, and thus the copyright is not violated.

When using someone else’s images in your tutorial, please make sure to include links to each source image. If you don’t do that, your tutorial most likely will be rejected!

Please remember that by following the above directions you are helping to protect the photographer’s rights, as well as to keep yourself and us out of legal trouble. Thank you for your understanding!

Author Agreement

If we publish your content on our website, you agree to the following:

• You cannot resell or redistribute the tutorial’s artwork and source files anywhere else.
• You can use the tutorial’s graphics in any commercial or noncommercial work except for online tutorials.
• You grant a license to our website to be the exclusive online publisher of your tutorial.
• You may not publish your full tutorial online, but you may republish extracts from it online (for example, on your own website).
• You may republish the tutorial offline (for example, by selling it to a magazine publisher).
• You grant a right to our website to republish your tutorial (fully or partially) or examples from it on our other websites.
• You grant a license to the readers to use the knowledge gained from your tutorial in their own projects without referring to you or to our website; though they are not allowed to reproduce the tutorial, they are free to apply the techniques they’ve learned from it.

Thank you for being our author!