=3 I do this often.

line art styles are almost natural, but color... forget it XD


(consequently, I don't believe I have my own style now >.>)

"NOOO! ORIGNAL KARACTER DO NOT STEEL!!! YOU TRACER! I~M TELLING" how can we have proper drama if people dont realize nothing is 100% new under the sun?

I AM 1000% ORIGINALZ! I MAED BLACK HEDGEHOG NAMED SHADOW B4 SEGA! I SUE DEM!!!!!


... it's hard to think of how to word things in that manner.. :)

I really admire this journals idea.
Thank you.

Is this serious or joking, I can't tell. D:

I'm serious.

Ah okay. :x

*steals your computer*

I'm learning! :D

I wish I could fav this journal. In my foreign land of mopeds, paintball and other engineering challenges, we call this sort of thing 'Technology'. You see something neat, you research it, copy it, improve on it, patent it and make a gazillion dollars. This happens every day and nobody bats an eye.

In furry if you do that, you're derided, persecuted and possibly banned.

Trust me, all my neat tricks and mechanical flourishes were inspired from something someone else did, or adapted from another technique. The idea is that you don't just imitate, you improve. 'That's a great idea, but if I use stainless steel and Viton Orings, it'll last longer. Plus, I'll want to polish That, That, That, and That with a dremel, and nickel plate That for durability.'

I'm not an artist.

But I do have a 5 gigabyte folder containing "inspiration pictures"; pictures of things that I happen to find aesthetically pleasing, or that have ideas I really, really like.

It's a solid concept. :)

This is actually something they taught me when I took a drawing course in college. Half of my effort should be copying the artists that inspire me, the other half should be original work. 5 copies, 5 original (at least) a week.

I'm not an artist but I agree with this journal 100%.

As my old drama teacher used to say, "Good actors borrow. Great actors steal."

Goes well for any creative art, though that doesn't absolve one of intellectual dishonesty.

you speak with great wisdom

and who or what was the inspiration of this journal? :3 Sorry only teasing but I agree with what you said. To those that cry about it and make drama from it, they really need to get out and see the world.

Basically everything is based from/on or ideas were taken and moulded into something else. It's all around us, be that video games, artwork, stories or even movies...although movies are more blatant as in remake after remake or the fact that Silent Hill uses and goes beyond the Evil Dead "vine rape" scene or House of Wax's knife through foot from Evil Dead's "Pencil in the heel" scene.

Point being, sometimes it can be done in a good way. Personally I think if someone gives credit for their inspiration or states where they got the idea from, then everyone should be happy...but then again, we live in the real world and not the ideal world ;)

It's how I learned when I started drawing. I don't remember if I discovered the technique myself or if I learned it from somewhere, but I do recall a section in this "cartoon book of physics" I had when a kid that talked about how every generation of physicists "stood on the shoulders of giants" by taking the work of the previous generation and improving on it. I.E., Newton discovered the basic laws of physics, but it was Einstein who was able to explain them ... but without Newton's work, he would have had nothing to build on. Or something like that. That's always inspired me, and may have something to do with it.

But this journal, specifically? Well, I've been meaning to rant about this for years now. You only ever see one side of copying here, the side where someone will post nothing but blatantly traced art in their gallery and pass it off as their original work. Tracing itself is a valuable skill, it helps train the hand to remain steady while working, but doing NOTHING but that is a dead end, and passing off traced work as your own is just dishonest. But my point is, any kind of copying gets shoved into the same category as tracing, and suddenly copying by eye to learn and improve is demonized.

And then today I stumbled across a couple of things that finally motivated me into saying something about it: http://i.imgur.com/8RIb6.jpg and http://ccmixter.org/files/Citizen_X0/30318 .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zubgy3oNXYQ

I do that a lot but I don't copy them so much as use them for reference or farming ideas. Largely because I liked it. I want to draw things I like and having that sort of resource can focus you on what you need to do.

ahmen to this

Depends. Can you recommend a decent art program that's actually free?

http://www.gimp.org/
http://www.getpaint.net/
http://wistinga.online.fr/opencanvas/

GIMP's the most full-featured free art program out there, but the interface can be a little strange. You'll probably need to mess with the default brushes a bit to get something that's good for sketching, but aside from that it's excellent for any type of image manipulation.

I don't have much experience with Paint.net. Doesn't seem very well suited for drawing, but it has a decent set of image manipulation tools and is fairly simple to use.

OpenCanvas is very basic. Most people use it for the networking feature, but it's a great sketching tool without any real configuration needed, aside from setting the default language to English.

I'm more of a writer than an artist, but this is pretty decent advice.

To an extent I agree with this but I have only once in my life actualy attempted to reacreate something that was already drawn. I look at a drawing that I like a certain aspect of and consider to myself how it was done, I then put it into a new image in my own thoughts of how it was or could be done. I have more fun and find more enthusiasm ( in the process fueling the creative mood ) doing it that way than simply trying to recreate the already existing image.

The way you draw has inspired me to a degree aswell.. Recently quite a lot of my hobby drawings have been kept private though. A couple years ago I got a job as an illustrator + animator and my desire to create things in my free time for people to see dropped a bit. :/

This is how characters come to be for me, sometimes. I get inspired by cool characters or ideas in art or other mediums, borrowing some of the elements going into them.
I actually recently saved some various images which inspire me for a character. It seems like a good idea for multiple things.

Hunter S. Thompson used to copy books on his typewriter verbatim when he was young; to get a feel how it was to write a masterpiece like the said authors.

Not sure if it's relevant, topic just made me think of that for some reason lol.

My favorite quote: "It's not what you take from, it's where you take it to."

This advice is incredibly useful, but I feel like you're softening it up for them.

I'd spent almost 10 years developing characters from other people styles, and not only did they look like blatent copies of said characters, even the ones who didn't notice a resemblance just noticed a hollowness and lack of uniqueness in them.

A former friend of mine also did this and still does it to this day, and his characters are yet to catch on and become popular.

It wasn't until I STOPPED deriving from others' work, developed my own style, and used that, that Draggyn and friends were created. Draggyn and Co are definitely my most popular creation to date, almost anyone who has watched me on FA or frequented my website back in the day knows who they are and how unique they are.

My advice is to use PURE imagination and don't derive anything! If you can't do that, then don't expect people not to call out your creations for being alike something else.

Here here!!! We share a similar mindset!

I've been doing this for a while. I need to do it even more.

you know i felt like my art was crap for week, reading this makes me feel better thank you its just what i needed to here, i mean hear

It is surprising to me how much people will borrow, but then seem somehow embarrassed or unwilling to credit their inspirations unless pressured. I think being inspired by someone else and wanting to try to do something like it is fine, as long as you credit your sources.

I ran a short D&D campaign heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress and by Drawn to Life. I've had a story idea never written but bouncing around in my head for years mixing Ghost in the Shell, furries,  mick39's bird characters (not the Sergals), characters inspired by  extvia's art and various inspirations of music I've listened to over the years (yes I know that sounds incredibly fanboy lame, and the story probably would be complete trash if I ever did write it. xP) I don't ashamed for having borrowed or not come up with various 'original ideas'. I was inspired, and that says a lot about how much I liked and appreciated those inspirations.

This is what my drawing teacher in College taught us. Considering he's had his work up in some pretty big name places, I would like to think it's advice that works.

A while ago (Summer of 08, posted it after FA came back online) I made a journal about drawing tips and this was one of them. If you still just learn copying is actually a good way to find your own style as you quickly notice in what way your drawings vary from those of others.

I started by "copying" too, not tracing through images but looking at ones from my favorites back then and trying to recreate them, and I soon noticed how my own drawing style slowly crystallized out. Nowadays the resemblance between my art and the source material is barely there anymore but that is because I went through about 12 years of learning and refining by now.

And still I do take source material to learn from, certain ways of doing things like shapes for inflation or how certain "body parts" can be drawn better.


My advice back then was when you draw from a source and want to upload it for critique the best thing to do is CLEARLY state it is drawn from source material, best give a link back to from who it was (and by extend it would likely be best to ask the person who drew it if you're allowed to) and say it is mainly for learning purposes.

That's one of the best ways to learn something. You can find out about the process without having to fuss over the creative stuff. Once you've got the hang of the process, when the "creative" stuff comes, it's easier to make it happen. I've done this with music, transcribing or rearranging stuff other people have written.

it seems diffrent artists have diffrent opinions about this, not to long ago I read a journal of an accomplished artist in the fandom that said you'll never get anywhere if you copy other artists, personally I think your both right to an extent, I look at other artists pics to get the general idea of a pose but I prefer not to copy it detail for detail

You might want to name that folder something innocuous though, if you're doing that here.