That Looks Like Mine! - Copying a Character

Copying an entire design on purpose is really horrible. Though, I am more so lenient with taking a particular aspect of someone's drawing and applying to your own. Like for example, you like to draw anime characters and you see another artist that draws anime characters that are really amazing. With their art, you notice on a few of their works that they enhance the eyelashes to make the eyes pop. You try doing something similar with your art and really like how it looks with that lash style. With that instance I think it would be okay since they aren't copying someone's style or art as a whole and rather are using a particular thing about it that they find appealing. Whenever I pixel or draw anime eyes, they are sort of a combination of different styles I've seen used by other artists. Originality for the most part is very important, but using other references to help form your own style is okay to me. Copying as a whole is pretty much plagiarism and is not okay.

 

I agree with Bloom, looking at how other artists draw can improve your own skill, even using parts of a characters personality that you like, or aspects of a design might be alright, but in designing a character I would never straight up copy, I would be more likely to fuse if anything. making it more thenm a different eye color or hair style. Originality is the whole point of an OC anyway if I'm not mistaken.

 

I wouldn't mind if someone used my character for something (especially for cameos), but the problem would be if they claimed it was their character. They wouldn't even have to explicitly state that they used my character, as long as they don't lie about who owns it.

 

Well if there's one thing worse than copying it's blatantly using someone else's precise character design with NO permission or credit. This has happened to me; someone decided to take my character without asking and commissioned lots of fetish pictures without crediting me... I talked to the artists he commissioned and asked them to take the stolen character art down but they didn't give a crap.

But yeah, copying people's characters is pretty lame. I don't think I've had people copy a character, aside from the one character thief.

 

I can remember having my art 'stolen' in the past... by my sister!

Sort of.

For as far as I can remember, I always used to accuse my sister of stealing my ideas for school art projects or title pages. It infuriated me that she tried to use my ideas and 'make them better'. But the past is the past.

Luckily, I've never had anybody else steal my artwork, as the 'thieves' would usually get credit.

 

Oh, no no no! We were always friends! It was only when I thought she 'took' my ideas when I started to blame her (she's right next to me). But other than that, we do make characters together! When we're bored, we sometimes play a drawing game where we draw features of an unfinished character, and we take turns doing so, eventually piecing a character together.