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Mocking Jay by Offwhite
Description
#02 at Assembly gfx compo.

Based on the Hunger Games novel series. Drawn with wacom intous4 in photoshop cs4, with brushes from k04sk.deviantart.com and keepwaiting.deviantart.com

References:



Details
Submitted by: CONS - Page loaded: 2613 - Rating: 8.67 (9 Votes)
Votes
elend(8) ALiEN^bf(9) veto(8) Wade(8) Bobic(10) - jok -(8) Grip(9) mog(9) noma(9)
Comments
offwhite | 2012-08-05
My reference sheet is not my inspiration. My inspiration is the Hunger Games universe. I know it's only a word, and the use of it on artcity has a very wide range. It might sound like nitpicking, but why not tell things as they are?

One important thing though, I forgot to mention that the stock for head pose came from the lovely reine-haru.deviantart.com. Sorry about that!
CONS | 2012-08-05
Hey offwhite, thanks for your comment. It actually made me think about the term "inspired" again. That time, we agreed on it as a general term of inspiration, references, sources etc. but now i am thinking, maybe "referenced from" might be the more suitable term to represent the idea behind it.
A thing that would speak in favor if "inspired" may be that i find that "referenced" might have the association "copied from" sticking on it and i wanted to avoid that at all costs.
I hope to get into a dialog about this with some more ppl.

Last but most important. Contratulations, this is excellent work!
offwhite | 2012-08-06
I agree it's hard to find a term that's both neutral and informative, especially if it also needs to be "diplomatic". But for me personally the term "reference" is very neutral. They are tools to help you realize your ideas.

I believe that at some point all works are referenced from what we have seen. Even the abstract or surrealistic stuff are just combinations of shapes or figures we have at some point remembered. And since we humans are limited creatures, there will be objects in the physical world we haven't "learnt" how to render correctly. The only reasonable thing to do in that case is to find some sort of reference and learn. Copying someone else's work entirely is a different matter of course. But let's not get into that.

Anyway, as you said, it would be really interesting to get more opinions on this.

And, thank you! It needs some more polishing though. I see that now that I've won a screen that doesn't hide my mistakes from me
Grip | 2013-01-16
My $0.02:
The photos posted above are indeed references. The picture is not an exact copy of an already existing work, but some images have been used to understand lights/shadows, anatomy and so on.

A classically trained painter will, as a part of the education, study human anatomy to better grasp how poses, shadows and so on affect the human body. And yet, many of them use photo references for commissioned portraits. Perhaps mostly because noone would have the patience to model for a rennaisance-style painting nowadays.

It might be harder to use a real-life setup to a painting than it is to use a photo, because a photo is completely static and is already delimited by the camera. But it is still a skill or technique that can be learned.

The real artistic skill in the case of realistic painting - mainly portraits - lies in conveying something MORE than the original reference, regardless of if it is a still life, a photo or a model. I think you prove you can do that in this image.

If the work is not intended to be a realistic-looking depiction - that is, stylized in any way - it can be a caricature, or a cartoon, or something more playful along the lines of an illustration, then copying is so much more obvious and thus easier to identify.

A lot of the great old pixeled images are all about technique. There's no doubt a lot of hard work and time has been spent on transferring an already existing piece of art to a downscaled, 32-colour version. A work of superior forgery, almost. This also gives birth to an understanding of proportions, shadows etc. but there is no feeling of originality. Unfortunately, this old-school way of "converting" existing works to pixeled media, thus copying it, has created a paranoia on the scene regarding the originality of a work.

The human mind is fantastic, but nobody can paint a portrait from memory alone. The coder might resort to a language reference or a book on mathematics, the musician samples real-life instruments and the graphician uses a reference. It's as simple as that.
Grip | 2013-02-14
Wow, after reading the double screen thread on CSDb (http://csdb.dk/forums/?roomid=13&topicid=84365) I feel rather disillusioned.... People STILL do stuff like this? Huh. (Not a comment on your picture, offwhite).
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