So, a friend of mine does fanart. (And before you ask, yes, most anime/manga publishers actively encourage fanart.)
In particular, consider this picture:
Another picture showed up, on deviantart. I’m not gonna bother linking, it’s already been reported. But I snagged a copy.
And then I scaled it down in size from 866 pixels in height to the 826 pixels in height of the Excel picture. And I cut and pasted and overlaid, and guess what! I got this:
Now, a bit of commentary is perhaps in order. It is notable that the very first attempt at scaling the image got something close enough to be within a couple of pixels of the right height. All I did to align these was move the traced picture around until the faces were lined up; the rest came out pretty well.
First, start with the amazing similarity of the faces. Same eyes. Same nose. Same mouth, except that where Excel has a bit of a fang, the badly-traced Starfire has a sort of smirk. Oops. Pay more attention next time. Same bangs, same little fluffs of hair… Very impressive.
At the shoulders, we see our first major divergence. Our aspiring tracer doesn’t know much about anatomy, and couldn’t figure out how to compensate for Excel’s ludicrous shoulder-poofies. As a result, her left shoulder seems to be rather impacted into her chest.
A little lower we find two excellent examples of how we know this is a trace. The left breast has a lump large enough to call for immediate surgery; it sticks out too far to the right. (The right breast, using a line actually found in the original, is fine.) But the beauty is the flipper/hand on the traced picture, reflecting the difficulty of tracing Excel’s featureless black glove! With nothing to trace, our friend has to merely guess.
At the knees, and on the boots, we once again see careful duplication of many lines. Starfire’s boots, in addition to exactly copying the style of Excel’s boots (an unusual choice), have a black band right where Excel’s socks change color. The distinctive calf-high split-side boots with thick cuffs with a V-point in the front are bad enough, but look at how precisely the positions of the feet are mirrored. The left hand seems pretty original, but you might want to ask yourself how closely it approximates the right hand flipped left for right…
Yeesh. Why do people do this? More importantly, why do they pretend its their own work, instead of just saying “hey, I found this excellent picture, and I traced it and changed a few things”?
Comments [archived]
From: beoba
Date: 2005-12-09 00:45:21 -0600
poor self esteem?