Art Tips For Programmers? 565
An anonymous reader writes "Recently I've found myself in a bit of a bind with artwork. My programming contracts have been rather small, barely enough to pay myself let alone an artist. The art needs aren't intensive, mostly icons or sprites depending on the project. Despite owning a few key apps (Photoshop, LightWave, Maya) my art production output is rather poor. Are there any other developers who have learned to be self-sufficient? Are there any resources available to educate me on the finer points of making graphics that look professional?" One resource for the less-artistic among us is the collection of free SVG clip art at freedesktop.org, though it won't give advice for creating new art. What are some others?
Re:The Tools? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's kind of like Microsoft's penetration due to software piracy..
In any case, we aren't discussing tools, but computer art. Tools don't make the artist. Practice, patience and passion do, as some famous person once said.
If you can afford Maya, Lightwave and PS ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Amateurs create amateurish art. (Score:5, Interesting)
Riiiiight... (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh, yes, he's struggling as a programmer but can afford thousands of dollars in digital imaging software. Not only that, but he "owns" both Maya and Lightwave and still doesn't know what he is doing? Who the hell owns both?
Re:Leave it to the artists? (Score:5, Interesting)
Mmmkay.
The finer points of stick figures (Score:4, Interesting)
If it's for an office-esque app, though, the highly "modern professionalist" users would likely cringe in self-righteous disgust at such a suggestion.
Photoshop, LightWave, Maya? (Score:2, Interesting)
Advice from a designer (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen a lot of sites designed by developers and I can tell you what to do - listen to what I say and you'll be better than 90% of the sites on the net: keep it simple.
This works on so many levels it's ridiculous. The most well designed sites [apple.com] with the most expensive designers do this as a matter of course. It's not only refreshingly easy on the eyes it's also good business.
Don't try to be gabocorp or razorfish - those guys already have the look-at-me-look-at-me-look-at-me market saturated. Most paying clients want something more professional. Stick to what you do well - developing, hopefully - and it'll get the recognition it deserves with a design that lets your real work shine through.
Pick a nice color scheme [wellstyled.com], stay away from comic sans and courier and you're halfway there. Leave the graphics for photos and logos, use color sparingly, and limit yourself to as few different colors and fonts as possible.
If you're really interested you could pick up a few design or mac magazines - really! even if you don't use a mac - just to get an idea of what clean & simple design is like.
Time-Warping to 1993 (Score:3, Interesting)
"Once upon a time, when the WWW was whipping across the business landscape like a cold wind from the North, nobody in business had a clue how to wrangle it. Was it an IT thing? A Marketing thing? A New Business thing? It was a Time of Chaos, and still-moist script-jockies were christened "Web Masters" and given the imprimatur, "Um, do your thing. And here's a six figure salary, cuz we haven't a clue what 'your thing' is. Oh, and make it look 'cool,' cuz we heard it's supposed to look 'cool.'"
And they did their thing.
And it looked dreadful.
Happily, business recovered, bean counters and Marketing Directors finally found something upon which they could agree, and color-blind code-jockeys were partnered with art-types so the WWW could outgrow its purple-orange acne-encrusted adolescence and mature into pseudo-suave 'white-is-the-new-black' twenty-something hipsterism."
Bottom line: I'd rather teach an artist how to code (and have done so), then let a coder try to "do art." But if you want it to look remotely professional, you prolly need at least two heads involved.
Definitly Students (Score:3, Interesting)
Make some copied of this flier and post them in the grpahic and art departments of the local college. You will probably get quite a few calls and ask to see some wrok they have done. The one that appears the most responsable and has the work you would think you want is the one you choose.
You probably won't have to pay over $100.00 to $200.00, depending on the scope of the work. If it's just icons you need, $50.00 may be fine. Let them know they can use this work for their portfolios and use you as a reference in the future.
It benefits everyone. You get cheap design labor and they get beer money/positive references.
Nice to see the other side of the fence. (Score:4, Interesting)
And the programmers are looking for art tips? Nice.
My advice : If you can't do it yourself, make a deal with someone who can. It doesn't even have to involve money. Could be barter or whatever.
Just remember that an artists time is just as valuable as yours, if not more so- and artists are typically subjected to the harrowing horrors of Art Direction. "Make it smaller! Make it rounder! Can I have it in cornflower blue? It's too complicated! It's not complicated enough! It's not what I want but I know fuckall about how to communicate my vision to you so I'm just going to keep requesting changes until you resign from the project and tell all of your art friends I'm an asshole!" and so forth.
I do video and admin work for a living, and I share my work area with a designer who gets pushed around and shat on daily. I love working for myself, but from what I've seen, having someone else in charge of my visual output is a special kind of hell- which is why I don't do contract work.
Know exactly what you want and be prepared to produce several "along these lines" or "kind of like this, only..." examples to illustrate your point. Give the contractor too much free reign and you're likely to get some whacked out thing that bears no resemblance to what you want- wasting their time and yours in the process.
Re:one place to look (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Practice and experimentation (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Riiiiight... (Score:3, Interesting)
ignorant someone? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've had graphic designer friends come to me for minor-incident tech support or other small software-related tasks, because they don't have the money or budget to get a full-time software partner. The same problem occurrs with smaller developers. budgetary restraints in software projects simply eliminate the ability to hire a graphic artist for minor work.
In a perfect world, only graphic designers would design graphics and only software developers would develop software. As it is today, some people have to do a little of everything to get by. Some of their required tasks they're trained in, and in others they're not. I'm sure you can design the most beautiful icon ever seen by mankind, but if you can't do it for $100 or less, then you're not going to get many requests from programmers working alone.
Re:Amateurs create amateurish art. (Score:5, Interesting)
You certainly can produce excellent icon-level art, even if you have no talent at drawing at all. You still need a decent sense of aesthetics, though.
As one example, I've generated several icons for the (commercial) application I develop using an almost perversely hackish approach.
I write a perl script that uses GD::Image to draw a large (512x512) version of the shape I want, using plain flat colours for each region. No drawing skill required, no need for pixel-accurate mouse movements. When I'm happy with the shape and colours of the icon I run it through aquatint [sticksoftware.com] to give it a glassy 3d look and a drop-shadow. Looks great.
(But for the toolbar icons and so on I licensed a generic iconset from IconExperience. An excellent investment in software that doesn't look like it sucks, for less than the price of a legal copy of PhotoShop.)
Re:Leave it to the artists? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:if you don't have it, you don't have it (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:one place to look (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:if you don't have it...HOW TO FAKE IT (Score:5, Interesting)
Great Advice and absolutely true, HOWEVER, for the "DIY" types, i would add:
1. AVOID THE HIGH-LEARNING CURVE TOOSLS, SUCH AS:
A. Photoshop
B. Dreamweaver
C. Flash
D. ALL THE 3D Products; Lightwave, Maya, 3dFX
i'm a programmer/developer, and i've been using some of the above for years in high end web design, and find that if i don't use them for a few months, i have to relearn big chunks of the program, sometimes ending up with a 3:1 ratio between learning and designing.
2. USE THE MORE "AUTOMATED DESIGN PRODUCTS, SUCH AS;
A. Ulead PaintShop Pro -- http://www.jasc.com/products/? [jasc.com]
B. Macromedia Fireworks
C. Adobe Photoshop Elements
D. Cool Button Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/ [buttontool.com]
E. Cool FX Menu Tool -- http://www.buttontool.com/ [buttontool.com]
These programs are substantially cheaper $$$$ to buy then the "Biggies", and are designed to take some of the load off some of the design choices that can drive even highly skilled designers (Choices such as; opacity, blends, masks and moires)....
STEAL, uh, i mean "homage" any image (OBEY ALL PERTINENT COPYRIGHT RULES, AND DON'T "HOMAGE" FROM MAJOR SITES THAT ARE KNOWN TO EMPLOY LOTS OF LAWYERS!!!!!!!!!)
you can be a good citizen and ask, or you can homage them and alter them enough to make them "yours"
3. LEARN HOW TO FIND HELP FROM PROS: there are a # of websites designed to provide such help, for example http://creativepro.com/ [creativepro.com] is used by pretty much every designer i've worked with or known. everyone of the major software provider has both developer programs and tutorials and community BBs, forums, etc..
some companies such as Adobe and Macromedia really push these developer forums and you can frequently get better/faster/smarter solutions from these forums, than from the companies' Tech Support programs!!!
4. SELECT A "LOOK AND FEEL"; from a product/service/??? similar to what your product/service/??? and use that to extract GENERAL guidelines about how to present your design. Chances are these folk have paid good monety to learn lessons about to sell your similar product/service/??? -- go to school on them, BUT DON'T copy their design (Lawsuit City), extract their approach and see how you can apply it to your particular project...
Good Luck!
Re:one place to look (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're looking for a true art forum, with solid feedbck from real artists, http://www.eatpoo.com [eatpoo.com] No, it's not as bad as it sounds.
Re:Programming rules for art. (Score:2, Interesting)
"6. A little rounding or making it a little edgier sometimes is all it is needed to make the customer feel that they have a good product. Just take a shape control and give it a curve of 15 make it White with a Black border and put it underneath a group of widgets and they will think it looks super cool."
That is from the late 80's early 90's UI design... never, ever, use a "shape" control to draw random shapes on a form, window, whatever, unless it's the widget designed to group other widgets.
Doing so will just make your application look like an uber-cheesy VB3 app... in my humble opinion.
Re:Leave it to the artists? (Score:3, Interesting)
I AM a professional graphic artist, and there's no way someone would dump money into both Lightwave AND Maya without knowing at least one of them. And, if this guy is a "coder" and the requirements are as indicated, such as icons, etc. WTF is he going to use Lightwave and Maya for? Photoshop, yes, you can stumble by to create something with a few books and a few weeks of time, but thinking that either of those powerful, general purpose 3D design and animation packages would be useful for program related artwork is foolish if you don't know them ahead of time. If time is money, and it is, then this guy wuld have to "spend" 10X to 100X in time to learn EITHER of those apps to get to a point to be able to use them for the indicated purposes what he would spend to just hire an artist to begin with.
Perhaps he's not that bright? Well, I'd argue that anyone that is smart enough and talented enough to make enough money to afford both Lightwave and Maya, should be smart enough to do the basic business equation of make vs. buy. Not that smart, not that much money, back to square one this guy is using pirated software that is causing it to be more expensive for people like me that actually NEED it and actually PAY for it! Pisses me off.
Now, if this guy had tons of $$$, then perhaps he can afford to buy those packages as shelfware for the "someday I'll get time" type thing, and write them off on his tax returns. However we have a self admission that he has no $$$ so that theory don't hold water.
Steal Ideas (Score:5, Interesting)
Steal your ideas, mine have been ripped off more times than I can keep track of and I assure you no one is ever going to be able to do anything about it.
I see it all the time, some slick looking site based on another designer's ideas, and it hurts bad when it is my own work getting stolen. I have had companies provide me with other people's conceptual sketches (in some cases, sketches from friends of mine that I already know have not been paid for) and ask if I can do the same thing cheaper. I have had people ask me how I pulled off some neat trick in Flash, gone to their email domain and seen my work being copied frame for frame. I have found watermarks in content I made showing up in other people's sites and been told no visual idea belongs to anyone. Originality stopped being a virtue in 1997, why even try?
You should steal whatever artistic concepts you think you need, cutting and pasting screenshots into Photoshop should be sufficent for any purpose. Intellectual property is a joke unless you have an army of lawyers, and it still costs too much for most companies to come after you unless you are costing them big bucks. Consider buying a scanner so you can steal ideas from magazines and newspapers as well - ESPN the Magazine is a great source of content to lift and maybe it will keep my stuff safe.
Just put 'Artisitic Genius' on your business card and tell people you are Picasso's evil twin. Go spawn children and steal... uh... 'study' their crayon drawings for use in your work. Carry Silly Putty to lift tattoo outlines directly from people's skin and pass them off as your own. Spend all your time at hotels and pay for your meals by signing them off to other people's rooms. Give up technology and just start mugging people, same thing. Phish.
If anyone ever calls you on stealing artwork, refuse to acknowledge the 'similarities', tell them to bite you and claim they stole YOUR ideas. If they still bug you, find out their phone number and threaten their families in the middle of the night. It works.
M
Re:one place to look (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:one place to look (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:if you don't have it, you don't have it (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes I spend a great deal of time getting things exactly even, or lined up precisely when it doesn't matter, or getting the image dimensions in pixels to be even multiples of 16. (Seriously, my geek side is like the Gollum to my Smeagol.)
My primary piece of advice would be not to obsess over symmetry or nice numbers, to temporarily set aside your inclinations to make everything general-purpose and extensible. You can adjust vertices by 0.1 units every time, or you can just move the damn things somewhere that looks about right. The latter will look better. Save copies often if you're worried that it won't. (But it will!
As a programmer you do have a couple advantages. Turn your tendancies to over-engineer a problem into making the thing higher-resolution than you would possibly need. You know scaling down or compressing to
And most of all, if your work looks anything at all like something you might see in Windows XP, or reminds you in any way of any MPlayer skin you've seen recently, it should be scrapped immediately unless you want your project to look fugly on purpose.
Re:Leave it to the artists? (Score:3, Interesting)
- I disagree - van Gogh, Michaelangelo and Leonardo, all taught themselves technique and then got to where they were through relentless practice and perseverance. Figure studies, copies, sketches, early drafts, training - none of these artists works just suddenly appeared.
I think the real question is what level of art you're aspiring to. Learning to be an amateur jazz musician at a relatively late age (from 30 to, now, 38) has really changed my ideas about artistic creativity.- There's no secret ingredient to artistic creativity. Inspiration doesn't just come along and hit you. Take a look at Beethoven's notebooks --- a seemingly simple idea like the opening bars of the 5th symphony was actually the result of many, many revisions.
- You have to practice your technique. It's hard work.
- You should attempt things that are within the range of difficulty that your technique allows you to do competently.
- Seek out people who know about your art form, and who are willing to tell you when you suck.
- Over time, learn why those knowledgeable people think certain things suck, learn to detect and throw out your own failures, and eventually learn not to make those mistakes in the first place.
In keeping with item 3 above, here are a couple of visual art things I did that I think were simple enough that I was able to carry them out competently:- book cover [lightandmatter.com]
(OK, go ahead and criticize them -- I forgot rule #6, which is not to take criticism personallyweb page banner [theassayer.org]
You can do it - get creative about the process (Score:3, Interesting)
- Go to the thrift store and buy an action figure you like. Something posable helps to have options.
- Find a hill you like. Nuff said.
- Point your camera at the hill on a tripod. If you have some way to take a picture without touching it, great.
- Place the figure about 18 to 25 inches away from the camera so that it appears on top of the hill in a natural way.
- Take a shot with the figure in place and another shot without. Keep the camera as still as possible.
- Go home and open the two images in Photoshop.
- Select the image with the figure and press CTRL-A to select all. Now CTRL-C to copy (just being thorough). Select the other image and paste (CTRL-C).
- Now play. You should have the images in layers one on top of the other. Try fiddling with the opacity, or add a filter or cutout the figure and re-position it. Don't be afrait to try anything - especially blurs! Let people fill in their own detail. Worry about what the image is instead of how detailed it is.
(Yes, I know this is a classic special effects method. It works well for an example.)Some great Photoshop tutorials (and Maya and others too) can be found in Computer Arts Magazine [computerarts.co.uk]. The tutorials are step by step with great examples to learn from. It's a little pricey here in the US, but worth it for a beginer.
As to how to make an icon rather than an animated GIF or a JPEG or something else, just look up the spec. Google for "Photoshop icon tutorial [google.com]" or or "Photoshop animated GIF tutorial [google.com]". Think of the different file specs as... well, specs. Photoshop can edit pretty much any image type you'll need.
I tend to do a lot of self contained work (Art, Music, Programming) so I can attest: Anyone can do it themselves.
A few thoughts (Score:3, Interesting)
First, it's a skill that can be learned like any other. Sure, some people have a natural talent, and others don't (like me). There are also people who are natural programmers, and they will always be the best at it; but anyone can learn to program if they really want to.
I've ended up doing tons of stand-in art for games, and a lot of it ended up going into the final game, because it was Good Enough. Usually it was character animations and interface elements, basically the easy stuff, but still - it goes to show you that there isn't as much of a line between the artistically talented and someone who can just learn to work the tools.
Here's a few random tips from my many years of hanging around with really talented artists as well as my own tinkering:
Tools - I'm pleased to say that the OSS art tools you can get today for photo art and 3D are as good as or better than their commercial counterparts for many tasks. I've used Photoshop, Maya, 3D Studio Max (and the original 3D Studio, for that matter), and Lightwave in the course of my career, but I find that the Gimp (for 2D) and Blender (for 3D) are today better, or at least as good as, most of the commercial offerings. One thing about this may be that both of these programs are geared more towards programmers-become-artists than pure artists, which may be why I find them more intuative and powerful.
Color - Color is a huge element. Crappy shapes with a good color scheme actually look pretty good; nice shapes with a crappy color scheme always look bad. Typically you want to combine complimentary colors - purple and gold, for example - in a way that is pleasing to the eye. It can be tricky to get this right, but one trick you can do is use the color wheel in Gimp. Find the first color you are going to use, and then go to the exact opposite side - that's your complimentary color. Note that a muted color (tan, for example) should fill more, proportionately, of the image than its bright complimentary color (red, for example). When in doubt, go look at a nice-looking website and steal their colorscheme.
Compositing - You can do a LOT by compositing photographs and other existing graphic elements. For example I made the header image for this website [dusk.org] by compositing shots I had taken in New Oreans, plus a couple photos from images.google.com eg, Stonehenge in the lower left corner). Using the Gimp's color adjustment tools, scale, resize, rotate, and opacity, you can collage together a bunch of unrelated images and end up with something that looks pretty cool.
Learn Blender - A great way to make a final image is to create a central element in 3D, and then paste it into an image and edit it up with the Gimp. That's how I did the graphics for this site [adamwiggins.com], for example. Blender is surprisingly easy to learn; this excellent tutorial [blender.org] will have you up and running in no time. I was creating elements usable for compositing in my 2D images in a matter of hours after I started learning it. (Of course, I have a lot of experience using other modelers, so it may take a complete 3D novice longer.)
Last of all, I will suggest the tried-and-true method for self-teaching yourself almost anything: duplicate! Go find a piece of art that you think is attractive. Study it closely. Pick it apart. Now try to create your own version of the same thing using whatever tools you are trying to learn. The process of taking apart someone else's image will teach you a lot about the elements that experienced creators use.
Check with your local AIGA chapters (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't mean to sound condescending (seriously), but most professional graphic or interactive designers have worked their ass off in order to get where they are. That typically means 60+ hour school weeks in a decent undergraduate program, and or even more grueling training in a graduate program.
Unfortunately, many in the development field think designers are talented "artists" who can make things pretty. We're not. We're problem solvers who should be helping users to interact with (your) software or multimedia. Moreover, this interaction should be both incredibly functional and emotionally immersive (ie: iPod).
(this is the part where Slashdot folks respond with "I taught myself and now I'm the head blah bitty blah designer for Company X"... don't listen to those people. Unless they're named David Carson, they probably suck. Worse yet -- they, and or their boss, probably don't realize that they suck.)
Now... what they hell am I getting at? Well, you could start learning visual communication skills in order to become "self sufficient." However, you're interface design work won't be very good unless you take the time to get some real training..... Or, you could hire a graphic or interactive designer.
Graphic and or interactive designers can be quite pricey. $35 to $200 per hour. Nevertheless, if you take advantage designers or grad students who are willing to do quality work for cheep (or free), you could be in good shape. Many designers will work for peanuts if you offer them some creative freedom and have a project they would love to include in their portfolio . Sometimes having a cool piece in your portfolio is worth much more then a paycheck.
If I were you, I would check with your local AIGA chapters ( http://www.aiga.com/ ) or graduate design programs. Look for a talented fresh designer who needs to build up his or her portfolio. Try to get them to do some pro bono work
Font sources: DaFont.com and CORELDraw (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't pay for anything until you've spent an afternoon browsing through DaFont [dafont.com] -- 4000 free fonts, many of which are worth having.
Also (and don't laugh!) get any old copy of CORELDRAW, even if the program is for another platform; it's ten years old and will be cheap as dirt. But, it has over a thousand perfectly usable typefaces in TrueType format.
I'm by no means a professional typographer, just someone with 8+ years of programming and, before that, 8+ years of graphic design, with a strong amateur interest in typography. So I appreciate real fonts, like you'd pay $400 apeice for from a professional font foundry, or the value of a whole spectrum of historically important type families. However, there is enough in these two font sources for almost anyone to get by on the cheap, as I presently do.
Taking some time (a few hours) to pick a nice sans-serif font (think Arial) for headlines and a complementary serif (think Times) for body text, can very quickly improve any project. By complementary I mean having similar letterforms. Look at the shape of the 'a', 'Q', and 'J' and especially the top of the 't', as well as the overall 'colour' (the density of the text) on the page.
One combination from the COREL CD that I'm doing a lot of work with at the moment is Context Condensed for headlines, together with Atlantix for body type. But experiemnt for yourself.
Self-sufficient pro prepublisher's tips (Score:3, Interesting)
However, you probably can't get a copy of that program any more. So the next best bet is to get a copy of FuturePaint (freeware--do a web search) for Macs. But if you can't do that, get something that is reasonably quick, that can import and export different file types, that can scale graphics and change the number of colors gracefully, and that has some basic drawing tools.
(Sorry, Linux folks, GIMP just doesn't cut it. Nor do the K apps, which are slow and crash too much.)
Also, save your work using different file names at every step of the way. It isn't worth the time if you mess something up. Indeed, when I'm doing outlining, I like to save my work several times during that process
Okay... now, step by step:
(1) find the dot size (like, 150 dots by 150 dots) of your desired icon. Quadruple that (600 x 600). Note that you'll have to do this whole process 4 times or so, if you have 4 different resolutions for a single icon. Don't skimp, or some of these will look lousy.
(2) Scan in a picture (a good hand drawing, or something from a magazine) of what you want. If what you want is not available, you can actually arrange picture pieces in a collage, and scan that in. I've done this to avoid copyright problems -- I can be sure that my work doesn't even look like the originals I used, because I cut a leg and turned it, cut an arm and turned that... you get the idea. Anyhow, scan it in so that it appropriately fills your quadruple-size area (600x600, above).
(3) Lighten the whole picture so that it uses only the 5/16 lightest colors. Now this will be your background.
(4) Select 2-3 standardized line sizes: for example, 5 pixels wide for outlines, 2 pixels wide for internal detail lines. Don't forget to multiply by 4, because we're working at 4 times the resolution (20, and 8).
(5) Now, using the line tool on black, draw all those lines with your sketch tool. Outline what you see, and make detail appropriately.
(6). Now print out what you have, then convert all light grays to white. Do that either by changing the color curves, or by using flood fill judiciously (which I prefer).
(6) Now, pick your colors. Again, standardize. (when I say standardize, I mean write the standards down on paper, and stick to them). Using lines of the selected colors, isolate patches and then flood fill them.
(7) You should now have an icon that is 4 times the size/resolution of what you want. Select it, and shrink it down to a quarter size. Your program should be able to handle merging (averaging) colors. If it can't, then save as a 256 color
(8) If appropriate, convert to 256 colors, 16 grays, or whatever.
(8) Retouch as necessary (probably won't be necessary).
Just as a note, I have found that I like my flood fill colors to always be in the lightest 16th of the palatte, whereas I like my lines to always be black. This makes the icon easy to see and identify.
Now... all that said... you seem to be having trouble making ends meet. Let me suggest a business website for you:
http://www.tinaja.com/ [tinaja.com]
The guy also has an $8 book which is invaluable:
___The incredible secret money machine II____
To the extent which I was able to follow his advice, it created a good business for me (~17000-$30000 a year).
That said, the level of justice in our country is crashing
Re:one place to look (Score:4, Interesting)
Example: A person's PC is about to crash, and a box pops up on the screen that says, "System failure. You will lose all your data." Then there's a button below that says, "Okay".
(Maybe an amusing little grinning demon icon would make it 'look' better
Re:if you don't have it...HOW TO FAKE IT (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't know law but what you're saying does make sense so I'll take your word for it. The reason it upsets me, however, is that I've seen great pieces of digital art that has been blantantly ripped off by online "groups" and then passed off as something they made themselves. I'm not the only one annoyed by this behaviour - In fact, it's so commonplace that most artist don't even have the energy to bitch about it anymore.
Your pride you may be entitled to, but it becomes arrogance to think to own the miracle of man's imagination, even the piece of it you bear through life.
Now you're being unfair, I never said nor did I imply that my work is gods gift to mankind or even that I'm a good artist for that matter. It's when people misappropriate the work unfairly without due credit, regardless if it beautiful or ugly (subjective) - if I'm proud of it of cource I'll get pissed if someone doesn't even bother to ask for permission. I'm not talking about clipart or tiny buttonimages from a webpage, these tend to be extremely generic. No, I'm thinkng more along the lines of wallpapers or such which may have taken many, many hours to make. The artwork I do does in fact usually end up being given away, mostly it's custom stuff for friends etc. I even tend to give them the Copyright if it portrays a unique quality of theirs!
NO idea is unique
How about the theory of relativity? All individuals posess some unique quality or in some cases even ideas, that's the beauty of it. Aaaw, forget it.
homage... (Score:2, Interesting)
influence is when you steal from someone who is alive,
plagiarism is when you steal from ME!