Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal.

Like most great quotes, this one is often misattributed - to Picasso in this case (thanks to Steve Jobs). Who may or may not have actually said it doesn’t particularly matter for these purposes, but what does it mean?

The ~original~ quote was actually backwards, and spoke of poets. It read something like “Great poets imitate and improve upon, bad poets plagiarize and spoil.” The quote was later turned on its head to the above, meaning something more like another famous quote “…We stand on the shoulders of giants.” (the english wording is attributed to Newton). We build upon those who came before us. Interestingly, the stealing and rewording of the original quote is a testament to itself; taking an existing idea to make it something new. Leonardo DaVinci’s famous Vitruvian Man is actually based on the drawings of a man named Francesco di Giorgio Martini — which were actually based on the ideas of a man named, unsurprisingly, Vitruvius. Martini’s illustrations of these writings predated Leonardo by almost 10 years, yet most have never even seen these drawings — let alone know this fact. Leonardo stole (in this context) the idea of finding geometrical proportions in the human body and improved upon them, but he did not copy the original drawings.

I often mutter a quote I apparently stole from hip-hop artist, Drake, that goes “It’s not he who does it first, but he who does it right.” There are a finite amount of good ideas, and only a small percentage of them are great ideas. Aside from a few masterpieces, most stories are merely reimaginings of older stories, which in turn are interpretations of…you get the idea. Often there is a twist to throw off your expectations (the result of already knowing the basic story, since it is probably one you’ve already known) or a modernization of something old, adding a new element that makes it new and exciting. Star Wars is particularly guilty of this — and that isn’t a bad thing. Often the greatest stories are just a retelling of something else.

So what exactly can you steal? Well, that is incredibly up to interpretation. When Warhol took a picture of a soup can and made it into art, was he stealing? At the time, people marveled at Warhol’s bold decision to put our mass commercialism into focus. He was saying something with this image that wasn’t “in this can is soup.” He used the can design as a symbol to mean something else. Whether or not you believe this makes it “good” is up to you, but the point I’m making is that this piece of art was not meant to convince you to buy more soup.

As I explore the indie game dev scene more, I find a common trend of what one might refer to as copying (maybe even more so in the AAA scene, but that’s a completely different story). Though there are definitely cases on what I’ll call the coding side of games. Minecraft clones need not be mentioned.

I want to focus on indie game art. If you’re in any way associated with the indie #gamedev scene you’ve probably seen a million slightly altered “A Link to the Past” tilesets. The tileable dirt roads, the giant round trees, the 1-tile destroyable shrubs, the tufts of grass spread tastefully about. You know the deal. I’ve seen quite a few that are actually really beautiful and build upon the truly timeless tileset very well. However, any new idea is quickly swallowed up by the outliers and spread through the #pixelart tag like wildfire.

I’d put this in the imitation bracket. It’s a perfectly fine way of doing something. If it isn’t broke, as they say. We’ve all used hearts for health, doors to the next level, even tilesets themselves are a borrowed way of making environments simple. It’s often a nice nostalgic call-back to something I’m sure we all cherished as younglings. It happens all the time, even subconsciously.

But we’re in a new era. An era of screenshots. And photoshop. The incredible ease of saving an image from a blog or twitter and passing it off as your own has become troublesome. It’s happened to me on a number of occasions. I’ve seen my art (uncredited) on t-shirts, on websites, as logos, and, as is the point of this post, in games.

THE POINT:

I am going to try to present the facts as well as I can, and as briefly (disclaimer: it’s not brief). I will not name names but I can’t stop you from digging.

The year was 2016, the month was October. My team and I were shuffling through game ideas, but mostly we were throwing stress balls at each other in my room which also happens to be our studio. I’d been toying with the idea of a multiplayer Warioware type of game. Being me, instead of focusing on actual gameplay, I began drawing a character. I wanted something simple, partly for aesthetic, partly so it would be easier to animate.

Exhibit a.

As you can see I went through an iterative process. Both of the pixel characters I was using for reference are my own designs. Honestly, most of these are terrible. I was looking for a silhouette. When I settled on something I liked, I enlarged and detailed. Unfortunately there are no connecting fossils remaining. My only retort to this will be this video of me drawing something in a style I consider “mine”, showing how a couple bad drawings can lead to one of much lesser badness.

I quickly began animating the run animation, I believe within the day-

-and posted to twitter immediately.

On November 14th I was @‘d by a user with this image attached:

I have a very faint memory of this, but my composer insists that I told him about “someone copying my art again on the internet.” I apparently liked the image and continued on with my day. Perhaps believing that this was some sort of fan art display.

I continued to post images of my character on my twitter account as well as my company, Vector Arcade’s, twitter in gameplay gifs and promotional art pieces. We have been using this initial design with the intention of allowing the player to choose his or her own head during play to add diversity.

some math amount of months later…

I receive a DM from a twitter pal of mine with a link to this tweet asking if these were my character designs. It went something like this:

We called him out publicly on twitter (I’ll touch on this decision later). After a heated and lengthy battle of words he did admit that he had used my character design for the blue shirt guy, but that he had developed the original, red shirted, character in 2007, based on some Mickey Mouse cartoons. At a point suggested that maybe I had copied him. Someone posted this comparison.

The argument moved to DM’s. He sent me an image showing me his original designs dated 2009 (he was apparently mistaken about it being 2007) showing his process and final character:

I anticipated a photoshopped image showing the dates modified because he had insisted on 2007, and could have easily photoshopped over another 0 over the 1. But in all honesty, this felt legitimate. He even sent me a shot from his phone of the screen.

At this point I felt like Winston from 1984. Someone was holding up four fingers and I was meant to say there were 5. I drew this character completely from my own head. I used only my own art as reference. Sure, there is some infinitesimally small chance that another character with similar features could have been created with nearly the exact same proportions in 2009… But it felt unreal. Impossible.

I’d like to note that the image indicates that the artist is accessing a folder from his desktop, which has an undeterminable amount of sub folders, eventually leading to a folder with 7 others that appear to be different school subjects. The “grafik” is assumed to be his art subject folder, and it has a single image in it: the one in question. Though possible, it seems unlikely that he would keep his class subjects on his desktop for 8 years, and that this class only required a solitary image — but I digress…

I immediately looked up how to change the created/modified date on a mac and was surprised at the ease of it. I changed the date on a drawing of my own, not to prove that I had created the image before, but to prove that evidence inadmissible. The fact was that my original character was posted on the internet first, and less than a month later was tweeted the first “clone” by the accused.

I made a video showing that my character was now from the year 2000, older than time itself really, and sent it to him. His response was unexpected.

I let my guard down at this point. He seemed too innocent to have maliciously done this. Was he playing the fool? I felt bad. I had responded with “yes with this evidence I conclude that.” (I promise I meant to say could conclude that) expecting him to retort with “you must’ve changed the date!” but instead he just said that mine must’ve been first, and that this must’ve been an [unbelievably astronomical] coincidence. He insisted that he did not trace my drawing. I reluctantly submitted that if he changed the eyes and hair that it would be fine…

wait.

I mean. If you want to believe in miracles, the 2009 drawings (which i was told were on the internet until summer 2016, and for some reason were deleted) matching up so closely with my original design was as divine as it gets, but now the proportions matched mine exactly. Artistic decisions of mine were duplicated. But I will let the evidence speak for itself here.

Copied? Stolen? Good? Great? His messages were littered with “please tell them that I did not copy you.” An understandable request. The repercussions of this are that a few game developers on twitter now believe that this person is a copier, a thief, and this is an obvious tarnish to his reputation. His 2009 file does seem to have merit, I admit that. Though the folder issue feels relevant, it’s merely speculation. I can say only that I had never before seen that file. My art was and is my own. I wanted to try to present this evidence as unbiased as possible, but alas, I am not a journalist, I believe I am a victim. But I hope you can come to your own conclusion.

This incident is not meant to incite a riot in my defense, but to raise awareness of something that often occurs to artists online. People love to eat up art on the internet. It’s amazing to be able to have such an incredible gallery accessible to virtually everyone on Earth — but every time we post anything we are leaving ourselves vulnerable to theft and copying at a grand scale. Although this case happened to involve non-pixel-art I feel it’s worth mentioning that pixel art is even more so vulnerable; as there are only so many combinations of 16² pixels that look like a particular thing. Characters, tiles, weapons, items… It’s fairly simple to copy a sprite and then nudge a few pixels around and claim it as your own design. I personally believe this is a problem I’m completely unsure how to solve.

In conclusion all I have to say is support your local artist. Know their work. Help find thieves and call them out, privately if you wish. Remember that a artist’s job is to make art. Note that if someone plagiarized your writing, your code, your music — even if it was “only a little bit.” — it would still be theft. Remember that 1k notes on twitter or tumblr is not 1k dollars. Our social networks are our portfolios and our resumes and we must post our work to get jobs. Someone out there passing our work as their own is detrimental to our success and potentially our finances. We want to continue doing what we’re doing — for you, and for ourselves.

THIS IS THE END — EXCEPT FOR THE REST

P.S.

I didn’t have a good segue prepared, but I wanted to include a few tips to beginner game artists:

a. Do copy your idols’ work — in private

It’s very rare to be able to just-be-good at drawing without some sort of reference. Some learn by step-by-step process, but many learn by duplicating what they see. It’s important that you do this. You may not notice them right away, but most great art is judged by their details. An artist will most always have a tell; whether it be shading style, line thickness, shape usage, color choice — you will notice it when you sit down and try to copy a masterpiece. “You must learn the rules before you can break them” probably doesn’t make a lot of sense for some things, but it actually does in art. It should probably be more like, “You must learn as many rules as you can so that you can personalize the ones you like, and actively oppose the ones you hate.” Again though, use these exercises as practice, not product. If you see another artists work and really want your art to look like it, try analyzing it further. What specifically is it that you actually like? How can you make that your own without copying them exactly? Is there something you don’t like? Why? How can you make it more “you”? Do that. Make it yours.

b. Yourself

You are yourself, obviously. Your friends all know what you laugh at, what you hate, your favorite color, your whole personality. Embrace that. Your art is as much an image of yourself as it is an image of a Half-Orc Barbarian. This means that every time you draw something, you put yourself in that drawing, no matter the style or medium. If you can figure out how and why it is you actually draw, you’ll always be in that piece, whether it’s a logo design or a pixel sprite. When you have a large enough body of work in the cloud, it will be obvious that you drew or painted these seemingly disparate things.

c. Just Do It

Art isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a competition. There is no “the best”. It’s a spectrum. You may be able to paint like Michelangelo, but that makes you a painter, not an artist (~in my opinion~). And by unique I don’t mean a-monkey-with-rocks-for-hands-and-his-feet-are-bass-guitars. I mean unique to yourself. It doesn’t matter if you draw like a 4 year old. Turn that into something cool. Work within your own restrictions. What do you like? What do you want to say? People will not care how ‘good’ your drawing is if the art is good.

d. iversety

This might be for some of you who already know how to draw pretty well and wonder where to go from here. The fact is that, unless you are incredibly persistent and extremely stubborn, you will not get enough jobs doing the one style you feel most comfortable with. You’ll have to step out of your bubble. A lot. Ideally you should do this in your own time. Don’t jump into a project completely blind. Of course, you will never be able to prepare for every situation, but having a few tools in your pocket can be an incredible time saver when you just-can’t-f*cking-get-the-leaves-right.

Often an indie-dev would prefer to have an artist he’s already hired to make a logo, or design a poster, sometimes even edit together a trailer. You don’t necessarily have to know how to do all of these things, but it’s essentially free work. I would encourage learning as many skills pertaining to your field as possible. You might just come up on an extra dollar just because you messed around in after effects for a whole day once.

B e. respectful of others’ art

If I need to get into this you might need to read the whole post again.

.aj