Originality, or: Great artists steal?

[theremin]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to the forum, and new to pixeling. I come from a programming background, but I've been dabbling quite a bit with graphic design and digital art over the past few years, and slowly but surely I've been honing my skills. Recently, I've started working on a new game, and, for the first time, I'm actually putting in some serious effort on pixel art.

Anyway, I have some questions about borrowing ideas and techniques from other pixel artists and games... Basically: How acceptable is it to borrow artistic concepts and styles from other pixel art? Do other pixel artists do this? How far is too far? etc.

I'm curious how people feel about it in general terms, but here's a specific example that I'd love feedback on too:

I love Craig Adams pixel art work in the iOS game Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. So much so that I've been inspired to (possibly) model my game's graphics partially after his art style. I'm not talking about his characters; those are incredibly unique and definitely his own thing. But I'm curious about borrowing his use of perspective, and his lighting techniques and shading techniques. Here's a Google Images search that shows tons of examples of his work:

https://www.google.com/search?q=superbrothers+sworcery&tbm=isch

Looking through those images, you'll see that the objects he crafts almost always use the same perspective: a "vertically flat", 90° horizontal view. In other words, you never see the tops of objects; the object is always at eye level, skewed sideways to give a sense of depth, with flat shadows on one side of the object, and subtle highlights in other places. (Look at his stones, rocks, and amplifiers for examples of what I'm talking about.)

Since I'm new to pixeling, it's hard for me to say how original this concept is. Is this something peculiar to Craig's work? If so, is it a terrible idea to use that art style as the basis of a different original game? I'm certainly not talking about tracing or directly copying his work - my game's setting wouldn't allow it even if I wanted to, which I don't - I'm just talking about using that "style". And, again, not the characters/people, the objects.

Inspired? Stealing? Both?

[blumunkee]

Craig's work is original, but the Amiga and adventure game influences are apparent. You say you're a programmer? Good luck matching the graphical quality of his work. That's a tall order.

As for others copying a certain style, that's how things work in the art world. Look at all the Cave Story inspired graphics you see in indie/doujin games.

Stealing is stealing. Unless you are actually going into Photoshop and copying/pasting his graphics, you can get as many guidelines from his work as you see fit.

[9_6]

I don't think styles are copyrighted.
I wouldn't cling to a certain style too much though. Especially if it's someone elses and especially if you're starting off.
It limits you, can be used as an "excuse" for mistakes and may lead to bad habits.

[Ai]

Ideas, stylings, themes? Steal like mad, but not just only from one source. As long as you do plenty of original stuff too, it only makes you a better rounded artist with an improved artistic 'vocabulary'.

[Helm]

The only limit imo is how much it'll grate to you that your art is going to be considered reductive off of another, better artist's style. Styles are bullshit, if you ask me. It's better to consider the implications of the aesthetic choices, I mean, why superbrothers decided to draw in the style they draw, instead of trying to emulate the style they draw in. If you understand the aesthetic implications, you'll realize that what you're drawn to in that particular style is not particular to the style, it can be re-approached with wildly different but coherent results that will retain that initial draw that pulled you to examine it. I can imagine the same 'olympic style' of superbrothers made in vectors, or isometric, or flatshaded without any highlights at all, or even very sculpted and per-pixel detailed and it would still work.

edit: furthermore, I am fascinated by how the use of cliches such as '[...]great artists steal' are used as some sort of common wisdom to reinforce one type of behaviour or another. If you're looking for artistry, you shall have to invent it, not discuss it and agree upon it and base it off on language, tropes and repeated behaviour, I fear.

[Ai]

Something I wanted to mention earlier -- actually, you could totally ignore my earlier post on the basis that this is simpler to understand -- is that being worried about originality is BS, because art is like science in that 'we stand on the shoulders of giants' -- just like anything else, art is meaningful only in the context of this huge body of existing culture which we are participants in, and actively avoiding imitation of existing culture mainly just makes things more sterile meaning-wise. Making sure that the decisions you make in your art are coherent and sensible is a good use of time; making sure that said decisions specifically differ from others' prior choices is probably a bad use of time (and a Sisyphean task besides.)

BTW, I thought that 'great artists steal' thing was talking about commercial realities of art production ('how do I produce a good enough, consistent enough result in a small enough time?'), rather than how to actually improve your art.
Thanks for pointing it out though Helm, I totally missed that it was even in the topic title.
To me it's a valuable idea because other artists think different from you, and having more ways available to tackle a problem is pretty much an unconditional improvement. That's why vocabulary* is important. So either interpretation pretty much works, IMO, as long as you know why you're imitating and what you hope to gain from it. In this way I may disagree with you, Helm: I see tropes and etc as an completely unavoidable starting point for invention, rather than things that are orthogonal to invention.

* I always think there is a better word for this idea than 'vocabulary'. But I haven't come across a more accurate one
('mental breadth' is kinda a mouthful)

[Helm]

From that point of disagreement we can only go further by comparing notes on what we want out of life, what we have achieved artistically, what lies ahead and how fulfilled we are and so on.

[Ai]

If this doesn't seem apropos, well, I don't apologize. This is me not apologizing -- what you posted did remind me that apparently a majority of artists are introverted*; which I'm not, I'm decidedly extraverted. So it's worth mentioning that I have certainly, inevitably, given advice that is most suited to an extravert -- I don't care about building structures of meaning all that much, I'm more concerned with doing stuff and trying stuff out.

I was going to say more (eg. introverts and extroverts, we both need to work on seeing things in the converse way, to unstick from our own small headspace) but it's late.

You may have replied before my edit, BTW, which clarified things a good deal.

* In your case it's pretty obvious that this is the case.

[Helm]

Yes I do see what you mean. Indeed for introverts, art (especially romantic art) is an internal quest for meaning and empowerment, whereas art for extroverts is more about function and language of communcation. I do agree that critique should be tailored with these distinctions in mind, though I don't think most of us (here) consciously take the psychological makeup of the person we're trying to help much at heart, because unlike you and I, most of the people that post for help here haven't been around for 10 years or whatever and we haven't read enough from them and about them to infer their inward/outward status.

When I speak above about 'artistry' then, I am indeed loading the term up with various charges that the original poster might not have had in mind. But I do sincerily think that superbrothers on their S&S EP were chasing something down their mirror pool, and that's what makes the art of that game so resonant. It's not a style excercise, I don't think. And if someone wants to achieve a similar result there will, inevitably, invariably, inescapably be a need for blood, not clay.

[Ai]

Hmm, I think perhaps we don't disagree at all (and regardless, I'm fascinated by this conversation). I don't mean to imply that you can simply add styles together in a mechanistic way rather than saying 'If I want to say X to the viewer, how should the style of my art work?' Rather, I mean to say that we are inevitably products of our culture, so when we go to quantify the exact look of things, we will most often find ourselves expressing that in relation to existing cultural art-efacts that we have previously experienced (and that's what I mean by the benefit of vocabulary. The greater the vocabulary, the finer the distinctions we are able to make (much as with a conventional spoken language)) Ah.. what I mean is in terms of our criteria for figuring out whether the style is what we want, rather than how we construct a style in the procedural sense that you might say that 'we construct a building from X materials in Y shape because of Z engineering requirements and A usability requirements'

So, in case that hasn't cleared things up: I don't think Superbrothers is merely a style exercise either, it's an expression of an particular aesthetic that is clearly quite well defined in someones mind, and as you say, could be expressed by a number of different means (we could contrast 'how you use the style' vs 'the apparent components of the style' to express this kind of distinction). Another way to say it, I don't believe people create artistic styles, by simply adding, subtracting, intersecting or etc existing styles; rather, I mean that that's how their brain allows them to think about styles effectively.

It's really a general statement about art, which seems fairly plain to me -- once you've drawn cats, you have a greater ability to think about how cats should be drawn; once you've drawn in a  saccharine style, you have a greater ability to think about how to draw in a saccharine style. What I'm talking about is really about achieving and maintaining the ability to think effectively about, in this case, artistic styles; and the process that actually allows you to think effectively about that topic may be quite different from your subjective experience of what happens when you think about it. IMO It's not enough to just pick something you find interesting and stick to exploring that topic only -- you need to accept new inputs that you may not believe relate to your topic or focus (but IME quite often actually do relate to it.)

So uh, to relate that back to originality -- the reason to copy styles is not to copy them but to learn about what makes up a style (sure, you could say 'an aesthetic standard' -- but I'm thinking more in terms of being able to dissect the components so you know how to match the ..parameters.. of the style to the aesthetic you want to convey). It might be appropriate to say that I'm, rather than trying to promote thinking in a certain way, attempting to promote doing the things that make thinking about certain other things possible.
IMO while the necessity of this is obvious past a certain artistic skill level, the fact that the OP asked such a question places them below said skill level.
So possibly we've only misunderstood each other's intended message in an interesting way.

I was thinking about what to think about in order to communicate in a more balanced, less extraversion-slanted manner.
Hopefully I succeeded.

And I hope that makes sense, I had fun writing it