I came across an interesting post (via Cartoon Brew) that compares rip-offs of Preston Blair drawings to the originals. The copies change a few details to fit the specific project’s needs — in this case to make it Halloweenesque. It’s these changes that ruin the copies.
Being very much an amateur myself, I wasn’t quick to note why they were bad (though to be fair I was probably distracted by the hideous colouring; something I did notice straight away). When you compare them side-by-side with the originals, it’s pretty easy to say which are the more sucessful images, but it takes a little while to spot exactly what makes the copies so bad.

This my favourite example because it shows how something small can make an image seem wrong; even if the reason isn’t obvious straight away:

There’s a big give-away here — the line that run’s through Blair’s picture depicting the line of action. Now look at the eyes. In Blair’s version the eyes follow the line of action and make sense when compared to the position of the body; the cat looks like he’s looking at something with his whole body. But in the copy his body position is in contrast to what his eyes are doing. This could make sense in the context of a story (e.g. he’s seen a mouse, then someone tells him off and he responds by moving his eyes), but without context it just makes it seem a bit odd.

From looking at remakes of good movies I think one of the biggest problems with copying is that you always miss some of the subtle elements that make it great. And at the same time you don’t put enough of your own decisions into it. But if you take a bad movie and make a good version, or you reimagine* the original concept and make something completely different then you can be successful. Sometimes.

In other words, no matter how great your talent, copying or tracing is always going to produce something inferior if you are copying something great. The remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is probably the most obvious filmic example. I saw the remake first and the credits were just funny. Then I watched the original and they were haunting. I guess there were probably oddities in the music, but the obvious difference was the use of the colour green in the remake. Without doing a side-by-side comparison I’m not sure what caused the different reactions, but my guess is it’s not mainly the green colour, but something to do with the interaction between sound and image. I think if I were doing it, I would have mismatched the image to the music to some degree to make it a little uncomfortable to watch.

Having said that, copying is one of the best possible methods for learning from the masters; it’s just not a good idea to turn the copy into a full production.

Take a look at the original post (here) for more examples and some great comments. Try to ignore the colouring and shading (it’s difficult) as it’s too obviously grotesque — and not in a halloween type of way.

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*No, not like Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. I can’t even comment on that because I haven’t seen it.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 12:40 UTC and is filed under Drawing etc. (t). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.