eregyrn-falls:

to-fu:

art mood

(I just wanted to add a reassuring anecdote here: this happens to all artists.  Don’t feel bad if it happens to you.  Once I was working on a fan calendar project with someone who was a pro artist – she was one of the organizers / judges – and was talking to her about her piece for it.  She did this piece and took it all the way through to finishing it, and it looked really good.  And as we were chatting, she suddenly said, OH CRAP, and realized that the main pose in her piece was a pretty good copy of a very distinctive main pose on a Michael Whelan book cover from the 80s.  She didn’t pull the piece from the calendar, she just made sure to add notes that it was an homage to the Whelan piece.  Because in a sense, it was, as her brain had so admired the original that it had lovingly stored it for future inspiration.  So this is the point: this happens to everybody, it happens to pros, and maybe you’ll realize it before you post a piece publicly, and maybe you won’t.  If that happens, just be graceful about it.  Realize you probably DID see the original at some point in the past, and just acknowledge the inadvertant source as prominently as you can.  It’s not the worst art sin in the world.)