[bmn2]

Get involved!
http://arttheftexposed.blogspot.com/

[MC1986]

Okay, a couple of things:

1) I fail to see any real similarity between any works you've compared on the site.

2) All artists, including professionals, draw inspiration and borrow design elements from each other all the time. It's one thing to blatantly copy someone's work directly; it's quite another to use someone else's work as reference.

3) This is borderline libel.

4) This looks like a troll post to me. There is no place in the industry for people with no understanding of fair use or copyright limitations. Take your extremist attitudes over to conceptart.org. You'll find more than enough people over there who share your flawed opinions.

Have a nice day.

[Reper]

Can you not see the remains of the other artist's drawing in this one neither?
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_W5BzSuy4iy...toverproof.jpg

There's one thing taking inspiration... doing paintovers on other people's work isn't fair use of copyright limitations.

[Xris]

Agreed Reper... it's the old "what's really original?" discussion.

"Inpiration..." is perhaps adopting a similar style or methodology in your works , while paintovers are simply that; paintovers. Can't see anything wrong with paintovers, but I would object strongly if someone overpainted one of my works and claimed it as 100% personal inspiration.

How long is a piece of string? ^^

[MC1986]

Wrong again. The two examples you provided may be similar in style, but that doesn't prove she plagiarized anything. The overall design, facial expression, silhouette and proportions are quite different. I'll once again state what I said before: All professional artists reference each other's work all the time. Of course there's going to be some similarity to other artists' work here and there; it doesn't mean anyone painted over or copied and pasted someone else's work.

Besides, given any subject matter's limitations, there's bound to be some repetition in how it looks whether it was intentional or not. For example, if someone asked you to paint a photorealistic portrait of a woman from a specific angle, specific lighting conditions, design elements, colour palette, etc, chances are it's going to look pretty similar to another established artist's portraits. This argument doesn't hold anymore ground than comic book artists who think they have ownership over the poses they draw their characters in.

Rest assured, I will be contacting this woman so she knows some jealous troll has been spreading lies about her.


EDIT: I just checked her DA profile and found this journal entry, which actually does seem to support your arguments. I guess I owe you guys an apology.

However, I still think this is the wrong way to go about it. If you suspect someone of plagiarism, you need to hear their side of the story before you jump to any rash conclusions. It would also probably be a good idea to notify the artists in question you suspect of having their work ripped off, so they may take care of legal matters themselves. There's no need for vigilante journalism here, people.

[Dona]

This is getting tiring. She admitted to overpainting a long time ago, apologised, removed her gallery, if she's smart she's going to dive into some real art studies and clean her name. People know what happened, had their say, no need to troll her any further.

That said, if you're so set on hunting down every overpainted and/or stolen image that has been published in one of the books, good luck. There's quite a bit of hunting to do.

[dman3d]

I certainly agree about going about this the wrong way. I read the first bombing flames that showed up here at CGhub (first place I heard of this) then I also read the DA entries and it appears to support the claim of plagerism, openly admitted in those posts, which is deeply saddening.

Inspiration is one thing but outright paintover is theft especially when presented as original. Sins of omission are still sins so to speak. Just my $0.02

In weird way once again art and creativity, taking an obtuse angle to it, drags something dark into the light, worthy
of talking about however painful.

[Xris]

Um... I've known Az for some years (though not talked to her for a while, Hi Az!) and she is in fact an excellent artist in her own right. I don't think it's difficult to 'stray' now and then... especially when there's so much very, very good work around in general to feed you with ideas and notions that had never occurred to you.

As Mother Thersa said, "S*** happens..." (or was that Arnie?) Anyway, as dman3d said, it's sometimes good to pull questionable works into the light of day and get it sorted out; regardless of the sensitivity of the subject.