The Fault in our Art Study: Plagiarism

The only way we could ever do some art right is imitating what works and then find more creative solutions to existing problems. I understood the process of learning art as knowing the rules first before infusing your own style to the pool of the knowledge. Everyone learns at their own pace. Imitation is the first skill an artist would have to learn before they could develop their personal technique.

Emulating their art is the way we can learn from the old masters. I look at the discipline of art as an elastic concept. It can expand to unknown limits. But it is inevitable that the artist would still come back to the basic principles in rendering form.

Art plagiarism and learning by imitation are two separate things, but there is a thin line an artist needs to keep in mind before crossing the line. The difference lies in the intent of the art. Plagiarism aims to deceive while learning by imitation is directed at studying the process. We can’t tell whether the artist is a plagiarist until we have proof they have deceived their audience, and they gained profit from that deception. Profit doesn’t necessarily have to be financial gain. It can just be a means to satisfy one’s need for recognition.

This post will tackle what I think is unacceptable and not when it comes to creating art posts that are “inspired” from other artworks. I have created a similar post in the past, but that tackled on how plagiarism affects an artist’s posting behavior in the platform which you can find here

Summary of the Post:

Defining Art Plagiarism: Complicated and Not

Uncomplicated Case Samples of Blatant Plagiarism

Complicated Case Samples - Not Real Plagiarism

Conclusion

Art Plagiarism: Complicated and Not

The definitions I’m using with regards to art plagiarism can be found here and here. No need to create a new definition because those already work for me. The reason why I labeled some cases as complicated and not depends on how clear-cut the case appears on impression.

There are art plagiarism cases where it doesn’t take a genius to know one just cropped, copied, or added some modifications to the original work and passes it off as their own as a faker. When the evidence speaks for itself, this is blatant plagiarism and doesn’t need a lot of evidence to make a decisive conclusion.

On the other hand, complicated cases are those that are at the borderline, requiring a few more verification steps to fulfill before reaching a definitive closure. These may involve artists sharing the same style in rendering art and could still have similar outcomes in a piece. This could also mean getting inspiration from multiple sources that the artist has unconsciously copied bits of content and confused the idea as their own.

There are cases where an artist could create a piece, not exactly the same output, but content-wise may have similar results from another artist’s existing work without knowing it.

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Uncomplicated Cases

I initially found this case after being told by @hiddenblade that the artwork was suspicious when I was applying for curie curator position. I camped this person’s blog, and without fail, this person was unfazed after being caught on succeeding posts. I notified curation communities responsible for upvoting his posts, and they were nice enough to remove their upvotes.

Initial Encounter and everything just went down hill from there. Follow up #1,Follow up #2 and Follow up #3

This is an example of habitual plagiarism and is one of the worst kinds I have initially encountered during my early abuse fighting days. It was bad considering prominent curation groups have supported the person several weeks prior to discovery.

Another case. As you can see from these two examples, it’s not difficult to prove the accusation of plagiarism to justify why I considered them uncomplicated cases.

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Complicated Cases

I found this case during my research about the possibility of mistaking someone as a plagiarist because they have the same style as their mentor. What if you are so good at copying other people’s style that your technique became a clone that the only way to know it was made by you is putting a watermark on it?

Aoi Ogata and Kyrie, the former is the mentor. I’ve known Aoi Ogata several years back (not personally, just his works). It’s not difficult to recognize images made by him upon impression. I recently realized that Kyrie created some of the images I had pinned up at Pinterest. Though this case existed outside steem. One could be mistaken as someone else’s handy work based on the image itself. The style is exactly alike.

Further into the rabbit hole, I came upon the term Ulzzang and how it relates to a possible source of inspiration to both artist in question. You can look up “Hate Chan” and “Ulzzang” and see some similarities in fashion, face, and color schemes. By my educated guess, his works are inspired by those photographs online but not necessarily mentioning where he derives his inspirations. Just came across this find during my study of his style.

This isn’t a real case of plagiarism but I thought it would be worth mentioning. I found @thermoplastic’s work similar to the Hellstar Remina created by Junji Ito. There is a resemblance in form but I know these two artists never knew each other’s work. I believe it’s just one of those scenarios where an artist creates something similar with another artist’s work. I’m focusing on the resemblance and ideas that take form in the visual illustration here.

I even found my own case with this image

When I created this line art, I was imagining a heroine in a red cape (red for the purpose of leading the eye to the center) and surrounding it with visual cues to focus on the center as if beyond the boundary lies adventure. Never really thought about red riding hood until I finished the piece and this was done like two years ago? Red came to mind when I was still conceiving a plan to start my blogs with SEO. “Red Riding Hood” was popular than “random red girl” on keyword search. Anyway, while creating this post, thinking I should look for examples that had my previous output seem like it was copied from somewhere else. And I found this, this and this. Same placement, different tweaks on the piece. Again, I only found these images when I was actively looking for works similar to my own. It doesn’t matter whether you want to believe me on that. Maybe every work here including mine was a twisted scheme to plagiarize each other.

The point is that artists can create works they don’t intend to have any resemblance with other people’s existing works. Sometimes it’s a matter of how an artist uses a mannequin drawing from a stock image as their base then dress up the character with personality. Or just building on common concepts until you arrive at the same mannequin style without knowing it.

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Conclusion

It is fine to study someone else’s technique and use that approach to render your own style as an artist. Imitation is part of growing up as a person and as an artist. We imitate first what we think works and innovate until we find what works for us. This is how artists grow to find their own style.

What is not ok is trying to create content obviously inspired by some other artist’s work without crediting them and be financially rewarded for it. This platform can potentially pay creators for sharing content. The last thing curators want is supporting content that doesn’t provide value to the platform and these include plagiarized content. Even without any monetary rewards, one could still obtain fame over works that do not belong to them. Declining payout doesn’t make the sin less culpable.

I do advise all artists from any level to credit their sources of inspiration if it is practical as to avoid eliciting unwanted attention and avoidable serious accusations.