Not to beat a dead horse, but things like what I'm hearing with the Rob Granito fiasco really get me steamed.
I'd heard bits of talk in the past, and even seen some of his work on DeviantART once or twice, but it wasn't until recently that I heard about Granito's prolific plagiarism practices. Which isn't a huge thing, sadly- you see it every day. It's a sad fact, but it is a fact- hell, one of my own designs was plagiarized on DeviantART. There's simply nothing I could do about it, sadly. But no, it wasn't the art theft that got me worked up. It was Granito's attempt to blatantly build up his reputation by claiming to have had a working relationship with the late Dwayne McDuffie that had me gritting my teeth as I read this article on AOL Comics Alliance ( http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/03/28/rob-granito-scam-artist/ ).
But! Aside from his obvious attempt to capitalize on McDuffie's passing, I can't completely hold "tracing" against Granito. Oh sure, I can hold the whole profitting from it part against him, and I do, but tracing is a very legitimate practice in artwork.
If you're a STUDENT.
I trace. I trace A LOT. Because I find that, often when I have trouble figuring out how to draw a part of the anatomy, or the position of an arm or a leg in a certain pose, if I trace a figure or another artist's work that emulates that pose on another piece of paper, it helps me figure out how I myself should draw it. Tracing is a wonderful learning tool and is extremely useful for problem solving. In truth, much of the time I do more tracing than actual drawing. But I never, NEVER, claim traced work as my own.
Granito shows that he has at least some rudimentary skill in art. If he didn't, he wouldn't have been getting away with it for so long. What this prolific plagiarist as prooved is that he has no idea how to be original. More often than not, I'd guess he doesn't do his own stuff because he can't THINK of stuff to call his own. His brain lacks the creative structure to supply him with original ideas, so he takes from other artists (Bill Watterson, Ty Templeton, etc) to fullfill his artistic pipe dream. And I can feel him there- I have a hard time finding my own style, and a lot of the tracing that I do is an attempt to find a style I'm comfortable with by obvserving how other artists have approached the same problems. But when he tried to pass it off as his own stuff, he crossed a serious line. Luckily, as I've stated repeatedly in the past, the art community is extremely tight-knit, and to wrong a few of us is to bring all of us down on your head.
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