In a weak moment I visited the Website for which I had been commissioned to create a pinup-inspired woman for a startup establishment.
Against my inner voice of restraint, I just wanted to see what the start-up got that was different or better than what I was working to give. The client canceled the project, said we were on different tracks, and paid me for my time to that point.
What the start-up got was better: It used the very art it supplied as inspiration for the illustration they wanted from me.
What's better than riffing off Vargas or Elvgren to create a custom illustration? Why, ripping off Vargas or Elvgren, of course!
Maybe the images used are royalty-free. Maybe they're low-cost stock images. Maybe they're just pulled off the Internet, already in low-rez jpeg format suitable for use on a Website. Who knows? Either way, none of the artists get credit on the site.
With pin-up girls, I've come to learn, ownership of art may be scattershot and frazzled. Vargas' and Elvgren's and others' work shows up in tattoos and modified on the Internet. Credit? Recompense? Hardly.I sketched some of the famous poses hoping to help the client decide which kinds of poses were wanted.
One Elvgren painting I found originally shows a woman kneeling forward in a sheer low-cut coral-colored dress, bare beneath. Without too much work I found a version of the painting, identical in every way except someone has applied an intricate tapestry of tattoos over her breasts, down her arms and over a thigh. The result looks organic, as if part of the original art.
Sorry, Alberto and Gil, your work appears to be fair play.
I don't know what the start-up is doing for its ancillary promotional items, for which it wanted a two-color image from me. Maybe I don't want to know.
It reminds me of when I developed a logo for proposed establishment near the Gulf Coast. The clients had seen a logo I created for a classical guitarist and wanted that same look, a guitar turned into a crowing rooster. I drew them many many images incorporating their establishment's name and the story behind it, varying the basic bird-cum-guitar concept.
OK, but we really like that other logo, the clients told me. I mean, we really, really like that logo! Why can't we have that logo?
Because … someone owns it … ? You'll have to talk to the owner of the logo. Oh, he doesn't want to sell? Whatcha gonna do? They dropped off the earth. Every once in a while I check to see if that establishment ever got off the ground, and if so, whether it just pulled a jpeg of my logo off the Internet.
Sometimes in this business, I'm dead where I stand.
