In light of the recent posts, I’d like to tell you all a little story.
Now, I’m not some crazy super famous artist, but I have been around for a long, long time. Most of the publishers I’ve worked for still talk to me regularly, and the children of some of those art directors have interned with me/take classes from me.
I get an email one day, from one of the publishers who’s son is a fan of my work, saying “Hey Jessica, we’re accepting submissions for our latest magazine issue, and (name redacted, son), recognized one of your pieces in the latest submissions. Are you coming back under a psuedonym?”
Considering that’s the first I’d heard of it, obviously not. The publisher was kind enough to give me the person’s name and info and I contacted them to let them know that they could not use my work in their portfolio. They denied it (even though we had the pieces there to show that yes, it was my work).
Here’s where using other people’s work is a career buster. I talked to my publisher friends. They talked to their friends. One of my friends has a regular gaming night with some of the art directors for Tor, Blizzard, and Wizard of the Coast, and naturally as a fan of my work and a friend, they passed the word along.
Within about two weeks, that person’s name had been black listed across most major publishing and gaming company’s art departments.
Remember. I”m not famous. I’m just some chick who has a lot of friends. That’s the same with a lot of these artists. That is why I say *do not* trace people’s artwork and try to sell it, show it as your own, submit it in portfolios, etc. That is why I say it is a career buster, because I have personally watched people’s dreams of an artistic career go up in smoke over this kind of thing.
If you are friends with someone who traces other people’s work, and ‘makes a few changes’. Be a friend. Be a REAL friend, help them protect their career by encouraging them to find their own voice and their own path. If their dream is to be an artist, then they NEED to be protected from themselves when they do something stupid like that, because they will never know when they meet that person who has just the right connections… and closes all of the doors on their career, just like that.