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August 31, 2006



The Ethicality of "Tracing"

Newsarama debates whether or not Greg Land is unethical.

Some of them have some odd standards they hold their favorite artists to.

As much as unethical it is, the fact is he still produces a lot of his own art. Total swiping of other's art is a bad thing and he should aim to cut that out, but if you were to go through every cover and every pin-up and every issue he's drawn, the majority will have been produced without copying.

Ofcourse, he should do all of it without swiping, but if that what it takes to produce a good monthly book like he does, it's a necessary evil (one which he should try to stamp out).

Other artists, like Tony Harris, get thrown under the bus and then defended.

As for Harris, if you're going to photo reference, he's going about it the right way. I can only gather from what I've seen in the back fo the Ex Machina paperback, but he poses people, acting out the scenes (this is similar to what Alex Ross does.) From there, I don't know how much is actual tracing and how much is reference. At HeroesCon last year, he had several stock circular artist model renderings (think those little wooden models, but preposed and drawn) to pull off of, so I'm not sure what his specific penciling is like.

With that method of obtaining reference, at least the facial expressions and body languages fit the characters. Even Land supporters will cite the plasticity of the characters and the odd, zombie like body language as what they're saying is vastly different than how they are posed when he's pulled a cool looking picture that doesn't match the scene.

Here's a link to the original web page that started the discussion.

Discuss this article in our forum.

Posted by YourMomsBasement at August 31, 2006 09:15 AM

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