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Below are examples of GREG LAND tracing, swiping and recycling.I will add more images as I come across them (if you find any, please email me).
This post is not intended to be an attack on Greg Land. It is merely a collection of examples found around the Web, sent in to me and some realizations on my part.
Enjoy!
RYAN MEINERDING (Iron Man & Thor movie designer) on the Left showcasing concept art for new Iron Man Armor.GREG LAND on the right; cover for AVENGERS #1 (Heroic Age Variant)*thanks, Ramon!
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Photo tracing.
From Uncanny X-Men #509.
Trace comparison pics found on Rich Johnston's Lying in the Gutters.
[Gladiator helmet Skull mask, via JimSmash Reader & google searcher"Melchy"]
Trace comparison pics found on Rich Johnston's Lying in the Gutters.
[Gladiator helmet Skull mask, via JimSmash Reader & google searcher"Melchy"]
Photoshop vs Greg Land's
(Random Rockslide inserted for composition sake -Land's is not a swipe/trace, that I'm aware of)---
From Contributer Andrew R: "This is a studio promo pic for Boris Karloff's "The Mummy" set side by side with Land's tracing. If you google image search "Karloff mummy" you'll see it in the first ten or so hits. I flipped it horizontally and rotated it to match Land's tracework."
Photo tracing.
Photo tracing.
Sanda Bullock traced and recycled.
Photo tracing and recycling
Recycling
Photo tracing.
Movie poster tracing.
Recycling... in the same issue.
Recycling.
Ray Liota and Ben Affleck tracings.
Recycling.
Recycling.
Photo tracing and recycling.
Photo tracing and recycling.
Recycling.
Recycling.
Recycling.
Photo tracing.
Photo tracing and recycling.
Photo tracing.
Celebrity photo tracing.
Swiping another artist's (Lee Weeks) work.
Swiping another artist's (Bryan Hitch) work.
Swiping another artist's (Brian Bolland) work.
Swiping another artist's (Scott McDaniel) work.
Recycling.
Recycling.
Photo tracing 2 diff't models... same character, different hair?
Copying a statue.
Recycling.
Recycling.
Porno photo tracing.
Recycling the porno tracing.
Recycling.
Recycling.
Celeb photo tracing.
Photo tracing.
Photo tracing.
Celeb tracing.
Swiping another artist's (Caldwell) work.....or Homage.
Photo tracing.
Celeberity photo reference.
Photo of toy tracing.
Porno tracing.
Recycling.
Photo tracing.
Photo tracing.
Photo tracing.
Swiping another artist's (Travis Charest) work.
Photo tracing, recycling and swiping of another artist's work.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UNCANNY X-MEN #500 COVER RECYCLE COMPARISONS:http://www.4thletter.net/2008/03/i-cant-get-into-it-sorry/
Copying another artist's (John Cassaday) work.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Below are pics from Lands' sketchbook with notes:
44 comments:
Greg Land is an embarrasment. I can't comprehend how he keeps getting work.
redirected here so sorry for the delayed comment but it is good to see so much of this layed out... god i HATE this fucking guy- as an artist myself I use plenty of photo reference but his blatant and disrespectful swipes and lazy tracing are an insult to those with talent who are still struggling in the industry.
This post is so good that Girlwonder.org just linked you on their site for this one.
I think I've seen another site show the Land/Hitch Jarvis image as having a common source in a photo-reference book.
And I'm pretty sure there's a Pamela Anderson Esquire cover that Land used for one of those images you have as recycled.
Ya know, I'm kind of weird. The photo tracing? Doesn't bother me. The recycling? Doesn't bother me. But stealing another artists work? That bugs the crap out of me.
Dynomite. I luv Grand Land's work.
Come on, if you're going to be criticizing a man for swiping other people's work, you should at least credit the people who put together these photo comparisons, like the 500 cover: http://www.4thletter.net/2008/03/i-cant-get-into-it-sorry/
i'm sure someone less lazy then i could find similar examples of photo copying with greg horn.
Fuck Girlwonder.org and fuck Greg Land
Nice to have them all in one place.
@Toriach:
Photo tracing is stealing another artist's work as well.
I happen to have a link to this images from my Photobucket:
This one's Ultimate Sue Richards, and Pixie from Uncanny X-Men #501. Note: Pixie's making this face while being hit in the head with a bat.
http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa262/surrealmonkey_wedding/worstblogever/SueRichards.jpg
And this collage, while the Jeans/Emmas you have some of, the repeated Cyclops, I don't know that you do. And, this is Uncanny X-Men #500 and #501. One issue apart. Putting Nightcrawler in the way and shading it a bit more doesn't change it.
http://i197.photobucket.com/albums/aa262/surrealmonkey_wedding/worstblogever/LandHunt-1.jpg
The picture credited as Highlander: The Series, I actually think is an early Al Pacino from Scarface.
Greg land is a good storyteller. He knows exactly how to lay out a page and keep the eye moving correctly, while creating a visually exciting experience.
He also knows how to draw. If you saw his earlier stuff, you would see that(Birds of Prey). It could be argued that his storytelling back then was crap, so he actually has come a long way since then.
Yes he swipes quite religiously and reuses many of the poses, yet he still understands the principles of drawing, line, rendering, spotting of black, perspective, anatomy etc. He understands it and chooses to manipulate it in the best way he sees fit.
In today's marketplace, it is expected to create a highly realistic, almost photo rendered comic book. It sells comics and makes the comic book artist money. This is what the audience wants.
The trend may eventually change to more idealized creations, and many artists who swipe without knowledge of art skill might be left in the dust. Yet artists who have the background and tell a good story will be able to change with it because they have the skills already. I think Greg Land is one of them.
to be fair, Jim Lee and others recommended sports illustrated ect for reference in drawing years ago..and theres nothing wrong with swiping a pose....
and some pictures of the same character are always going to look the saem (call it homage xD)
on the other hand...soem of these are far too blatant to be ignored.
Not all of these seem as dodgy as others..and recylcing is fair enough to some extent...as long as its your own stuff you are redrawing from similar pose (not redrawing.)
This guy however is a rip off. Hell they could pay me less than him and get better stuff. And to think this guy did UXM 500..issue 500 of UXM...its not evcn like issue 16 of some no name second string crossover or something.
Thanks for the link, Doctor Nick.
Most of the images above were emailed to me by others.
This post is merely a collection of images, all in one spot.
While a few of them I created, most are from JimSmash readers.
I'm all for giving credit where its due, so if you have anymore source links, please let me know!
Some guy at Wikipedia keeps removing references to Greg Land stealing other artists' work. Sheesh.
It was Land's unimaginative over-reliance on photo-reference that kept me from picking up Crossgen's "Sojourn," a book that I should have been the target audience for.
The guy is a blighter, in my opinion...
--Joe
A few of the above works I would agree do appear to be so similar that it's possible they were traced. Many though seem to be references or just coincidental, the human body has only so many possible positions. I don't see recycling to be such a bad thing, though it is more admirable to be totally original.
The single worst example of his work I can remember was in Uncanny X-Men a month or two back. In a single panel, he showed the three Cuckoo triplets, for which he just cut and pasted the same image three times. OK, bad enough and not surprising. But they were spattered with blood, and he didn't even have the work ethic to vary the blood spots a little, so they were absolutely identical. It's so lazy that it crosses the line into contemptuous.
Compare Namor here...
http://media.comics.ign.com/media/743/743865/img_7339254.html
To Adrian Pasdar (Nathan Petrelli)
http://seat42f.com/images/stories/tvshows/Heroes/Season3/Promo/adrian-pasdar-nathan-petrelli-heroes.jpg
The "Highlander" Greg Land artwork is definitely from The Godfather Part II.
Compare:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_rzdB5a4kLAo/SGwaGjstK2I/AAAAAAAAHaM/ZhO4qtB9lUk/s1600-h/Land44.jpg
http://oxygyan.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/god11.JPG
Gareth from Sojurn
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8b/Gareth_Sojourn.jpg
http://www.comicscontinuum.com/stories/0312/19/sojourn33.jpg
Clone from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Escape_From_LA.jpg
I think a few of these shouldn't really be on here. Particularly, the one of the vampire carrying the girl. That is one of the most widely used images/compositions out there. You can find everyone from swampthing to robbie the robot (not to mention 100s of other artists versions of Dracula) doing the same thing. Don't get me wrong, I think the guy is pretty shameful for the other stuff, but little nit picking stuff hurts the credibility of the legitimate examples. (It makes it look like a witch hunt, as opposed to genuine outrage)
just noticed something:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rzdB5a4kLAo/SGwIrM5G4eI/AAAAAAAAHY0/w_bEyF73Pnk/s1600-h/land07.jpg
http://l.yimg.com/eb/ymv/us/img/hv/photo/movie_pix/twentieth_century_fox/star_wars__episode_ii___attack_of_the_clones/starwarsep2_poster4big.jpg
LOL
"Step 1: find your photo"
like he's not even hiding it. Whatadouche.
I don't mind at all. Because I don't buy any one of those comics..at all
Horrible. And the tracing does not justice but makes the poses on different women look the same.
Why did he have to do this? He can just mix it up.
It would be a lot more forgivable if the finished product were better. Back when Timothy Bradstreet was an RPG manual artist, people downplayed his abilities by pointing out that he used models and photographs for reference instead of drawing from abstract knowledge of lighting, clothing folds, etc. But in the end, his drawings looked good, so the fact that he wasn’t a “real artist” didn’t matter so much.
Greg Land’s drawings, on the other hand, manage to be stiff, lifeless, fake-looking, yet also overly polished in a bad way. It doesn’t look like a photograph, it doesn’t look like comic art, it just looks like he started Photoshopping an image and didn’t know when to stop. Bottom line, it looks bad, and therefore it doesn’t matter what his methods were—it’s not worth buying either way.
OMG, you people are such elitist.
Please note that he gets well published work and many of you are still living in your moms basement.
Maybe if you traced up some awesome images then maybe you could get real work.
Gotta say though, I'm impressed people found his references. I wonder if people could find the references of other artist. That would be cool.
Actually a LOT of artists do this because they can't get the hang of anatomy, have tight deadlines, are unimaginative with poses, or have trouble drawing small & need to shrink something down, & that really should be forgivable.
BUT it's still best to:
1)Use eye-hand co-ordination instead of directly tracing over.
2)Not trace another artist's stuff.
3)Do not Recycle your own art.
4)Don't re-re-re-recycle poses.
5)Use only free or paid stock photos & public domain images, you know, so you don't get sued by the model or photographer.
This Blog is Fantastic..
But, for made comics on fast time, this is the only solution!
To at least be fair, as some of the other posters have already noted, it is not uncommon for comic artists (or any other artists for that matter) to use photographs for reference. Generally speaking, I think that the best comic book artists develop a basic sense of anatomy so that they do not consistently require references for their work. Also, while there are some fairly blatant rip-off's in this list, some can be chalked up to reusing poses that work well. Tons of famous artists find poses and composition styles that work well for them, and are incredibly successful at using them over and over again. Frank Frazetta was well known for using a triangle composition style in many of his cover pieces, and his work is considered to be some of the best in the fantasy art field. Consider at least, that the human body is only capable of certain movements, so posing a character can seem redundant after thousands of other artists have done it all before. I think ultimately, it comes down to style preference more than any single factor. Some people still love the art of Rob Liefeld *scratches head quizzically* , while others prefer artists like Jim Lee, David Finch, Michael Turner, Alex Ross, ect. I'm sure you could go through any artist's work and find things you don't like, but hey... some have what it takes, and some don't. (Also, you might at least remember that this guy comes from a traditional illustration background, in which photo references are so commonplace that it would be surprising for him to not continue the process in his comics)
I feel very polarized on this guy. I have a career interest in comics and animation; hell, I'm kinda jeolious because I'm not that good at tracing, and it would come in handy for my charaters who I am basing off the design off of real life people.
The way I see it, if your vision for a work includes homage and tributes to others then you can use their character design. I personally would like to use that version of the Joker for one of my characters. I also am no prude and don't judge a guy for using porn for a model. Everything Greg Land is doing has been done for years by artists before and after so why should we start caring now.
Well Land is different. He has no standards and he brutally overrelys on these techniques - and it shows! When you use porn as a referance it should be used when the scene itself has intentional Freudian implications, and not just for the sake of using porn as a reference. Tracing is cool because it can give characters a very realistic grit, but this page clearly demenstrates that has just as much chance of looking uncanny as looking pretty. And yes, no more beating-around-the-bush, his dirty habit of recycling his own work any concevable cance is God DAMN AGONIZING. There is including callback/referances to your previous work for your fans (which you do to crack a smile on their face) and then there is Greg Land!
Any complement I can give Land is backhanded because of the real problem at stake, and the problem isn't that he goes by this practice but instead it's the length he takes it. He is good at what he does but he takes it too far and comes off as disrespectful and flat out lazy. Looking at this long list got old fast but what actually did piss me off was that one comparason of Susan Storm using two models. He didn't just use two models for the same character-he used two models for the same charater, in the Same Issue, and in the SAME SCENE! WHAT THE HELL! there is NOTHING justifiable about THAT! I pitty this poor man despite his shamelessness; I get the feeling he insecure of his own talents and has no vision outside of "my job is to draw the characters" which makes him anything but an artist.
Another thing I didn't make clear was that I think the alternative ti recycling poses that aren't just made to make a shout out to something you did earlier. To me you should recycle poses as a last resort, like say your incountering a writers block or you have financal reasons illistrate something easily.
I'm with some of the other commenters. The tracing and recycling doesn't really bug me, it happens, but stealing is pretty damn lame. Although, I'm sure some of these were paying homage to the original and not necessarily stealing. Regardless, his work is a lot more aesthetically pleasing than the majority of other comic artists'.
Wouldn't be so bad if he did like Alex Ross does, in using real people to pose, take a picture, then work from that (not tracing, either). But all this recycling, mostly using copyrighted imagery, just reeks of laziness. Tight deadlines shouldn't be an excuse, either.
At least this way, he gets anatomy right, unlike Rob Liefeld...but it makes me think maybe he doesn't know anatomy too well! :p
about half of comic artists trace and no one is raking them over the coals. The recycling-that is a bit lame but i still think he's a great artist. Everyone likes to kick a guy that everyone else is kicking-that's where most of this comes from...
also the artists who lament "I can draw better than Land and why am I not working for Marvel"-any time they provide a link to their work it's invariably awful. I've noticed that the worse an artist's work is, the better he thinks he is....
Wally Wood was quoted as saying "Never draw what you can swipe. Never swipe what you can trace. Never trace what you can cut out and paste in."
Dan Adkins, who i believe worked for a while as an assistant to Wood, certainly took this to heart - i remember a Virgil Finlay illo and two panels from a story Johnny Craig had done for Eerie popping up, virtually unaltered, in the middle of a Doctor Strange story in his own style...
(When tasked with it at the 1967 World SF Convention in NYC, he protested that other artists didn't get grief for swiping. I refrained from pointing out that most of them at least tried to blend the swipes in with their own style.)
I got the impression Wood was being sarcastic, not actually advocating swiping.
It's fun how you see some comments here and you can bet if Greg actually wrote it ("Shane"?).
I understand the photo-referencing (which isn't the same as this, tracing), but, guy, the point where you copy other people's work and get paid for it, that's the least ethical thing I can think about.
It's shameful that he still gets to work. Say what you want about Liefeld, but at least that guy screws his own original feet.
Every single thing you said is nonsense.
"Ray Liota tracing."
More like Neal McDonough, but it can be Liota too^^
Or even a stranger turn - Land was tracing Liota but got McDonough's face))
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