The founding artist agreement, every clause of it

This agreement is between Freya Illustration FZCO Ltd., of Dubai Digital Park – Office A5- Dtec, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai, United Arab Emirates ("we", "us", "our"), and you, the artist named in Schedule A ("you", "your").

We are the company behind Freya's Academy at freya.courses and Twotap at twotap.art, including the Twotap Art Academy at studio.twotap.art and the Digital Art Summit. This is the same entity that already pays out on the fifty-fifty courses. It is not a new company set up for this programme.

You need to be at least 18 to sign this, and if you are signing for a company you need to be allowed to sign for it.

Schedule A at the end sets out your own numbers. Where Schedule A and these clauses say different things about your rate or payout method, Schedule A is the one that applies to you.

You make art lessons and let us publish them in the Twotap Art Academy. We publish them, promote them, handle the platform and the students, and pay you for what gets watched and what gets bought.

You are a founding artist on a deliberately small roster. We tell you before anything meaningful changes about the size or shape of that roster. You will not learn it by noticing your minutes fall.

Joining costs you nothing. There is no listing fee, no hosting cost, no revenue share on anything you sell elsewhere, and no charge for the production work described below.

Neither of us owes the other exclusivity, a minimum amount of work, a minimum amount of traffic, or a minimum income.

You own your lessons, your recordings, your artwork, your brushes, your written material and your name. Nothing in this agreement transfers any of that to us, and nothing here is work made for hire.

You give us a licence to host, stream, caption, translate, excerpt, and promote your material on our platforms and in our marketing, and to make the production changes described in the next clause. The licence is non-exclusive, worldwide, and lasts while this agreement is running plus the wind-down period in the leaving clause.

Non-exclusive means what it says, and it stays that way through every renewal. You may sell, licence and teach the same work anywhere else, including on Patreon, Skillshare, Domestika, your own shop, or to a competitor of ours, without telling us and without asking.

What the term commits is that your course stays in our catalogue until the next renewal. It does not commit that your course stays out of anybody else's.

You send raw recordings and notes. We handle structure, editing, thumbnails, captions and getting the lessons into the player, at our cost. If you would rather edit your own, that is welcome and changes nothing else.

Nothing goes live without your approval. You approve the finished lesson before publication, and you approve the way your name, photograph and artwork are used on your course page.

If a course is not working we tell you early, while it is still fixable, and we help fix it. We will not quietly shelve work you spent weekends on.

The captions, thumbnails, edits and course structure we produce from your material are yours to take with you. If you leave, you may ask for them and we will send them. We do not hold your own course hostage to make leaving expensive.

Your watch-minute payout activates automatically when both things are true: you have signed this agreement and your first approved course is available to students in the Academy. Usually that is the course go-live date. If your course is already live when you sign, activation is your signing date. There is no second written activation, no trial period and no waiting period.

From that activation date forward, we pay the rate in your Schedule A, currently $0.07 per qualifying minute ($4.20 per qualifying hour), unless we agree another rate with you in writing. Your portal shows those minute earnings next to your sales.

Before go-live, we may upload and test your lessons with our own team. That pre-launch activity is internal quality assurance, not student viewing, and earns $0.00. It is never converted into a payout later.

Example: if you sign on 1 September, our team tests your course from 2 to 4 September, and students can first open it on 5 September, activation is 5 September. Internal testing from 2 to 4 September earns $0.00. If the course was already open to students before you signed on 1 September, activation is 1 September instead; earlier viewing is not back-paid. In either case, 100 qualifying minutes after activation earn $7.00 at the current $0.07 rate.

A qualifying watch minute is forward playback that the lesson player records while the viewer has an active subscription and is watching a published lesson in your linked course on or after activation. Paused video, a tab left open, internal testing and viewing by somebody without an active subscription do not count. An active member rewatching a lesson does count, every time.

The player records seconds, so partial minutes are not thrown away. For each statement period, we add all qualifying seconds, divide by 60, apply your per-minute rate and round the final dollar amount to the nearest cent once. The portal may show whole minutes for readability, but the earnings calculation still uses the underlying seconds.

Watch minutes are measured by the same system the platform runs on for everything else. If you think the measurement is wrong, tell us and we will show you the underlying per-lesson data.

Qualifying minutes are paid at the same Schedule A rate whichever of our platforms the active member watches on, beginning on the activation date defined above.

Where a course of yours is also sold as a one-off lifetime purchase, you receive 50% of the net purchase price, which is the existing arrangement and continues unchanged. The same course may be watched inside the membership and sold as a lifetime purchase: qualifying subscription viewing pays from activation (go-live, or signing if already live), and a lifetime sale pays the purchase share.

Brush sets, sketch packs, written guides and other downloads sell on the same 50% split. A per-minute rate cannot pay for a file nobody watches, so downloads are not forced into that model.

Written tips and reference images that sit inside a lesson are part of that course and are not separate sales.

Net purchase price means what the buyer paid, less anything refunded on that order, then less our fixed 5.2% store and payment fee. Your share is calculated after both deductions. The same formula is printed in your private sales portal and on every statement.

Live sessions and featured guest slots are offered, never required. We schedule them with you or not at all, and plenty of artists run none.

At launch, Freya hosts the live programme. We only invite another artist when there is a useful session to make, and you can say no without changing your course, rate, promotion or agreement.

There is no default live-session or guest-slot fee in this agreement because none is required. If we invite you and you want to do it, we agree a separate fixed fee with you in writing before anything is scheduled.

The live broadcast and its replay are promotional content, not course watch minutes, so neither earns the Schedule A per-minute rate. The replay may stay inside the platform and keeps pointing viewers to your course and direct listing. If we later edit material from it into a published lesson in your course, only qualifying viewing of that published lesson counts as paid watch minutes.

You are not required to answer lesson comments, review student artwork or provide a fixed number of critiques. None of that work is included in your course obligations or in the watch-minute rate.

Structured artist feedback is not part of the launch programme. Freya and our internal team handle the feedback features that exist at launch. You may reply to an ordinary lesson comment if you want to, but there is no response quota, response deadline or penalty for not replying.

If we later test paid artist critiques and invite you, you may say no without changing your course, rate, promotion or agreement. If you say yes, we agree the format, quantity, deadline and separate fee in writing before you accept any student work. Until that separate agreement exists, you owe no artist feedback and no feedback fee is assumed.

We pay every 14 days, or monthly, whichever you chose in Schedule A, in US dollars, by PayPal, or bank transfer where PayPal does not reach.

There is no payout minimum. If you earned four dollars, four dollars reaches you. We pay the transfer fee and any currency conversion cost, so the amount your statement shows is the amount that arrives.

Before you sign, we record the details your chosen payment method needs: your PayPal email, or your bank account holder, account number or IBAN, SWIFT/BIC, bank name and bank address. If you invoice as a company, we also record its legal name, billing address, country, tax/VAT ID and any registration number you provide. You can enter and update these details in your private artist portal, or our Operations team can enter the details you send us. Review them in your portal before signing. We never ask for your bank login, card PIN or payment-account password.

Each payment comes with a statement showing the purchases, deductions, watch earnings and adjustments it covers. Your private artist portal keeps settled 2026 sales history separate from the open balance accruing from 1 August 2026.

If we cannot reach you to pay you, we hold your balance and keep trying. After 24 months of a balance we cannot deliver and no reply from you, we stop carrying it. We will have written to you at the address in Schedule A before that happens.

We keep payment records for 7 years for tax and accounting purposes, which is the same retention our privacy policy states.

We look at your rate together every 6 months. That review is a conversation, not a notice period.

Your rate cannot go down during a term. It cannot go down at any point without your written agreement. If we ask and you say no, your existing rate simply continues to the end of the term, nothing ends early, and nothing else about this agreement changes.

We can raise your rate at any time without asking, and we sometimes will.

A new rate agreed in review applies from its written effective date and does not reach backwards. The minute payout itself needs no later activation: it begins automatically when both your signature and a live course are in place.

The term is 1 year, and it starts when minute pay starts: the day your first course goes live, or your signing date if the course is already live. If it takes you three months after signing to finish recording, you still get a full year from go-live.

At the end of the term it renews for another year, and again after that, unless either of us says otherwise.

We will write to you at least 30 days before each renewal date to tell you it is coming, what you earned over the year, and how to stop it. You do not have to reply to that email for the renewal to happen, and you do not have to give a reason to stop it.

The year is a commitment in both directions. Your course stays in the catalogue, your rate is fixed, we keep promoting you, and we cannot drop you either.

You can end this at any renewal by telling us before the renewal date. There is no penalty, no notice period beyond that, and no argument. We take your course out of the catalogue within 7 days of the term ending.

Members who already paid for a term keep access until it ends. Direct sales and qualifying minute earnings through the end remain payable on the normal schedule.

Inside a term, we will take your course down early if something genuinely changes for you: a licensing conflict, an exclusivity deal elsewhere, a personal reason, or work you no longer want your name on. Ask us. We would rather lose a course than hold an artist to something that has stopped working.

We can end this early if you break this agreement in a way you do not fix within 30 days of us telling you, if your material turns out not to be yours to licence, or if we stop running the Academy altogether. If we stop running it, we tell you as far ahead as we can and pay everything owed.

When this ends, we stop using your name, your face and your artwork in our marketing, and we take down the material that promoted you. Anything already printed, cached, sent by email or posted by somebody else is outside our reach, and we do not promise to recall it.

Everything you earned before the end is still owed and still gets paid on the normal schedule.

That the material you send us is yours, or that you have the rights to licence it to us as this agreement describes. That includes music, fonts, stock images, brushes, reference photographs and anything else inside a lesson.

That publishing it does not break an exclusivity deal you have with somebody else. If you have such a deal, tell us before you send the material rather than after we have published it.

That anybody recognisable in your material has agreed to appear in it, and that any client work you show is work you are allowed to show.

That your lessons are your own teaching, and that you will not pass off somebody else's course as yours.

If any of this turns out not to hold, tell us as soon as you know. We would much rather take a lesson down quietly than find out from a lawyer.

Members belong to the platform, not to individual artists. We do not give you their email addresses. If you choose to reply to a comment or accept a live session, it happens inside the platform.

Anything you do learn about a student through the platform, including their work in progress, is theirs. Do not publish it, do not reuse it in your own marketing, and do not contact them outside the platform without their agreement.

One carve-out, agreed case by case: an optional extra, such as a sampler or bonus download, may live on your own site behind your newsletter signup, if we agree it and it is labelled as your extra. Students are told that getting it joins your list. Anything a lesson actually needs stays hosted with the lesson.

We handle member data under our privacy policy at https://twotap.art/privacy-policy, and we handle your own data under the same policy.

You let us use your name, your artist handle, your photograph and samples of your artwork to promote you and your courses on our sites, in our emails, in our app, on social media and in paid advertising, while this agreement runs.

We promote you as an artist, which means we will describe your work and quote your lessons. We will not put words in your mouth: any testimonial or endorsement attributed to you is one you actually gave us.

You may say you teach at the Twotap Art Academy, and use our name and logo to say so. You may not register our name or a confusing variant of it as a domain, a handle, a trade mark or a paid search keyword.

Neither of us should say anything about the other that is not true, including about earnings. Do not promise your audience an income from watching or teaching here, because we do not promise you one.

You are an independent contractor. This is not employment, a partnership, a joint venture or an agency, and neither of us can sign anything or take on an obligation on the other's behalf.

You are not entitled to employee benefits, holiday pay, sick pay, pension contributions or notice beyond what this agreement says.

You handle your own taxes, and any social contributions or business registration your country requires. We pay you gross. Where a law requires us to withhold something, we will withhold it, tell you, and give you the paperwork.

You decide when, where and how you work. There is no upload quota, no schedule, and no penalty for a quiet month.

We do not guarantee that you will earn any particular amount. The sales calculator is an illustration built from the price, orders and refunds you choose; it is not a forecast of your income.

We do not guarantee a number of members, a number of watch minutes, a placement on the home page, or that any particular promotion will run.

The platform is provided as it is. We work hard to keep it up and we do not promise it will never break.

Neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits or lost opportunity. Our total liability to you for anything arising out of this agreement is capped at what we paid you, or should have paid you, in the 12 months before the claim.

That cap does not apply to what we simply owe you. Money you earned is a debt, not a claim, and we do not get to cap our way out of paying it.

If somebody brings a claim against us because material you gave us was not yours to licence, you cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it. If somebody brings a claim against you because of something we did with your material beyond what this agreement allows, we cover yours.

If you have a complaint, write to support@twotap.art. We answer within 8 business days with a proposed resolution, which is the same commitment we make publicly to every customer.

Some of what you see as a founding artist is not public: member numbers, revenue figures, roster plans, unreleased features, and what other artists earn. Keep it to yourself while this agreement runs and for two years after.

This does not stop you saying what you personally earn, discussing your own experience publicly, or answering honestly if another artist asks you whether this was worth doing. We are not going to gag you about your own deal.

It also does not cover anything that was already public, anything you knew before we told you, or anything a court or tax authority requires you to disclose.

Your numbers in Schedule A change by agreement between us, recorded in writing, which includes email.

We may issue a new version of these clauses. If we do, we will tell you what changed and why, at least 30 days before it takes effect for you, and a new version never applies to a term already running unless you agree to it. In practice that means it takes effect at your next renewal.

If you do not want a new version, say so, and your current version continues to the end of your term. That is exactly the same as any other disagreement here: it does not end anything early.

Every version is dated, and the version you signed is stored with your signature.

You sign this by typing your full legal name on the signing page and clicking to sign. We record the version you were shown, a fingerprint of the exact text, the date and time, and the network address and browser you signed from. We email you a copy immediately, and your copy stays available to you afterwards.

We both agree that this electronic signature is as binding as a signature on paper, and that neither of us will argue otherwise on the grounds that it was electronic. This is recognised under UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 46 of 2021 on Electronic Transactions and Trust Services, and under the equivalent laws where you are, including eIDAS in the European Union, the ESIGN Act and UETA in the United States, and the Electronic Communications Act 2000 in the United Kingdom.

If you would rather sign on paper, ask us and we will send you a copy to sign and return. Nothing here requires you to sign electronically.

This agreement is governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates, and the courts of Dubai have jurisdiction over any dispute that reaches a court.

Before it reaches a court, both of us agree to actually try to sort it out: write to the other, say what the problem is, and give it 30 days.

Nothing here takes away a right you have under the mandatory law of the country you live in, where that law says it cannot be contracted out of.

This agreement, together with Schedule A, is the whole of what we have agreed. Earlier emails, calls and drafts are replaced by it, except that anything we agreed in writing about a specific live session or a specific piece of paid work stands alongside it.

If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of the agreement carries on without it.

We may transfer this agreement to a company that takes over our business, and we will tell you if that happens. You cannot transfer it to somebody else, because we agreed to work with you.

Notices go to the email address in Schedule A for you, and to support@twotap.art for us. Tell us if your address changes, because a payment we cannot deliver starts with an email we cannot deliver.

Not enforcing something once does not mean we have given it up.