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Butch Hartman trending for more plagiarism
- Thread starter ClickyCal'
- Start date
OP
OP
So any art that isn't totally original and is art of anything already existing is stealing?
Technically that's not "tracing", it's just copying.
"Tracing" is when you can't actually draw, so you put a thin piece of paper over some other artwork and then draw the lines as they show through the paper (or the modern digital equivalent). A tracer would change up some details like the hair or clothing colors. If they're drawing a specific character, they wouldn't use that same character as a reference, they'd trace a pic of someone else, and then tweak the colors to make it look like a drawing of the desired character.
Butch Hartman here clearly drew this copied art using his own (inferior) drawing skills. He has zero creativity and stole someone else's idea for the drawing, but his drawing skill (or lack thereof) seems to be entirely upfront and genuine.
"Tracing" is when you can't actually draw, so you put a thin piece of paper over some other artwork and then draw the lines as they show through the paper (or the modern digital equivalent). A tracer would change up some details like the hair or clothing colors. If they're drawing a specific character, they wouldn't use that same character as a reference, they'd trace a pic of someone else, and then tweak the colors to make it look like a drawing of the desired character.
Butch Hartman here clearly drew this copied art using his own (inferior) drawing skills. He has zero creativity and stole someone else's idea for the drawing, but his drawing skill (or lack thereof) seems to be entirely upfront and genuine.
Butch probably thought that was official art he used it as reference for composition. To me it doesn't even look like tracing. Just a shitty five minutes interpretation of something he saw on the internet
The Defense Force needs to come out when there's someone that's actually lifting the image off of someone's site and then posting it as their own work. This to me is just a whole lot of nothing
Butch should know better, especially if he clearly has a Target on his back.
Yeah for real, I'm told tracing isn't a bad idea to do as a beginner. Although I never did it, I did draw copies of real portfolio pictures of real people or sometimes copied manga pages but never traced. Once down the line I'll hopefully know enough to put a character I know in any pose without copying a fan art. I never do copy fanart though I admire them though.
This. He heavily referenced the work to make money off of it, which is poor work. Not tracing, but the next worse thing.
Also, imagine saying fan artists are just as bad as Butch Hartman.
Fanart persists because artists don't claim to own the character. Like why do you think companies from Disney to Shonen Jump aren't constantly litigating against the millions of fan artists it there? Because they acknowledge that just creating the art and sourcing the characters is fair.
They actually have quite the team of lawyers that deal with this issue daily but against mass produced works and not one off art pieces
The original drawing is obviously much better because it has care and attention behind it. What Butch is doing is doing a freehand copy/trace of the original drawing and then ink it separately (which he recorded). Whole process probably took about half an hour, while the original probably took about 8 ish hours.
Either way, very shitty thing to do. Asshole.
Either way, very shitty thing to do. Asshole.
This is one of the dumbest takes I hae seen here in a while.
Smarten up
Apparently a lot of dumb fools who haven't been paying attention to recent developments will absolutely jump at the chance to pay top dollar for a drawing of their favorite anime character by the guy behind a couple of B-tier cartoons they grew up with.
Just as someone who commissions illustration professionally on a daily basis, yes, fanart is technically a copyright issue whether paid or not, but it's not realistically going to be pursued unless you are selling it and come to the attention of the copyright holder. Media creators rarely care about people drawing their characters for fun (although don't try it with Disney...). Drawing copyrighted work for money and putting it on the internet is way more likely to land you in hot water, original art style or not, but plagiarism of fanart of copyrighted work for money is also just being a complete dick, with a secondary factor of being more likely to bring you to the attention of the copyright holder, which is rarely a good idea. The original artist is correct here- they don't own the copyright and have said so which is one issue, but the plagiarism is a separate issue and more one of etiquette in this case. You can say 'copyright' and shrug at all fanart, ignoring the passion and talent involved. You may not care about the etiquette, but most artists clearly do when it's so blatant, so saying 'who cares' as a shrug based on copyright is kinda wrong- obviously plenty of people do, most importantly the original artist and people likely to buy Hartman's work in future.
I suspect Hartman mistakenly thought the original piece was official which is why the artist is saying so, in order to make it clear that they recognise the copyright holder now it's gone viral.
Fanart is infringing on the rights of the copyright holder in that you are creating deriviative work (which recognisable fanart almost always is, and I mean in the legal sense of 'heavily influenced by' rather than 'bad' here). Only the copyright holder has the right to display, create and distribute such work. However, the real world doesn't work that way- no IP holder really cares about fan art that is supporting the community any more than they care about kids drawing their favourite cartoon characters and superheroes. It keeps an IP popular and is no threat to their ownership of the IP, and the odd sketch here and there isn't that. Most copyright holders have zero interest in pursuing fan artists, but if you are making hundreds of dollars off of it and come to their attention, or doing something that affects the reputation of the IP or confuses the idea of whose creative IP it is, you're going to be at the front of the queue for a 'cease and desist' letter as regular defence of copyrighted work helps to secure it as time goes by. Fanart is a grey area, but 'who cares' ignores issues that are obviously important to the fanart community, when tons of art brings a lot of enjoyment to people.
Just as an aside, this is why much of the pop culture t-shirt industry, which is also largely fanart sold for money (outside of cheap knockoffs of official merchandise) tends to go one step removed and imply/evoke something that's insanely popular rather than directly state it. For example, a silhouette of a buster sword against a stylised falling meteorite rather than a FFVII character, or a swarm of bats as a swirling cloak rather than Batman. Such original art is way more defensible under fair use. (Quote from the Wordpress article below):
Reasonable pieces here
Does fan art violate copyright?
At the recent Stumptown Comic Convention in Portland, I had the chance to chat with comic artists about what basic questions of law they have. One artist asked if he created any liability for himse…
www.google.co.uk
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That one's also technically not a "tracing". You can tell because the lines are all wrong.
This here is the original image.
And this is a tracing.
Now here's Hartman's image.
Those eyes are not Rumiko Takahashi-style eyes, they're a cheap imitation. The nose is all wrong. The mouth has the wrong shape. The ear is wrong. The braid is wrong. The boob-lines are fucking weird. Those swoopy lines on the arm are all wrong. The gold shirt-ties in Hartman's version are not knots. The lines on the belt are all different...
The picture is absolutely a copy, but it's not a tracing, because none of the lines match, not unless you blur them together through beer goggles like that twitter video did. Hartman drew his version freehand, while looking at the original, not by directly tracing it.
Butch Hartman is a hack, but tracing is technically the wrong word.
It's absolutely a tracing, just a loose one. The proportions are identical, it would be impossible to do that free hand.
He copied the original image to a photoshop layer, turned the transparency down, and re-drew the image on a layer above, but was sloppy with his line work so that it matched his "style".
It's extremely sad that a man whose name is associated to such a specific art style that you can immediately picture in your head due to massively iconic and successful shows cannot reproduce the art style himself. Because someone else did it.
So we're left to find out about all the shitty things he does like stealing art (that he does massively worse) and there was also something about a failed Kickstarter of his for a Christian network too but I can't recall what it was. All I recall is there was a sort of scandal over it
So we're left to find out about all the shitty things he does like stealing art (that he does massively worse) and there was also something about a failed Kickstarter of his for a Christian network too but I can't recall what it was. All I recall is there was a sort of scandal over it
Holy fuck, tell me you do not actually believe this shit that's coming out of your mouth right now
He didn't reference it, he copied it.
And now he's selling it.
And it's important to note that this isn't just some guy on Twitter: it's Butch Hartman, creator of Fairly Oddparents and Danny Phantom.
Ignoring the fact BH is a scumbag, if you were paying him for a commission wouldn't you want to see a character in his distinct style that he used for FOP or DP?
They copied the pose. His version is so shitty I doubt he traced. It's more of a teen titans cartoon style of the original than a straight copy job.
Edit: didn't know he was the fairly odd parents guy. So I guess more accurately it's a fairly odd parents style of the original.
Edit: didn't know he was the fairly odd parents guy. So I guess more accurately it's a fairly odd parents style of the original.
Tracing is gravely more significant thant 'copying'.
I don't even think that what he's doing is good. This is shitty. But, copying, referencing whatever, I just think that if you're slapping a label as severe as tracing onto something it needs to actually be an artist literally tracing over work from someone else.
No, tracing and copying without credit are essentially the same thing. They're both passing off someone else's work as yours. Worse still, he was selling it! And, frankly, it looks like he used a lightbox to do this, anyway.
Like, the original piece has a distinct little anatomy/perspective quirk on the right leg, where it kinda curves outward from the midline. Butch's drawing exaggerates this, because he's a bad artist who was just following lines instead of understanding the anatomy and composition at play in the original piece. Even if he didn't directly trace it with a lightbox, he copied the unique details of the drawing (poorly, but still), which is just as bad as tracing.
Beyond even the plagiarism issue, as somebody who used to be a lot more artistic than I currently am I'm normally hesitant to criticize the quality of another's work but I have to echo what others are saying here in that the Butch version is just not particularly good anyway, it's decent amateur level, not $200 professional commission level.
If I remember right, it was just some local old lady who volunteered to restore it.
This is the Fairy Odd Parents and Danny Phantom guy?! I've been making fun of those shows since I was a kid for looking like shit so this is vindicating as fuck. What a shitty artist!
Edit: Everybody should check out the replies to Hartman's post. A lot of artists advertising themselves and literally every single one has more talent than him.
Edit: Everybody should check out the replies to Hartman's post. A lot of artists advertising themselves and literally every single one has more talent than him.
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I don't know what to tell you. Yes it's shitty. No it's not tracing.
In my opinion If he had traced this it would be shittier, but regardless it is still a bad thing that he has done.
Why exactly is it that you think that companies don't take down the tens of millions of fan art pieces or other fan creations? It's not like they couldn't, in fact because of the systems in place on many places you can mass flag entire sites of your content and it'll be taken down with little pushback.
It's because it benefits the companies. The tens of thousands of mods for Skyrim technically violate copyright, but Bethesda lets it go because it's kept the player base engaged and continually spending money for the past ten years. SEGA actively champions their fan community because those same fans that create fan content are continually buying merchandise and games even after twenty years full of Sonic 06's and Shadow The Hedgehogs. Of course you have companies like Nintendo or Disney who are far more conservative in terms of what they permit, but even they don't go after Deviantart fanart because all it would do is cause them headaches and give them tons of bad PR with literally no gain. The same goes for Let's Plays, Walkthroughs, fan music, etc.
They have every right to take down a fan creation and mass flag every site and bring litigation against thousands of creators but a lot of current fandom, hype culture, etc. would crumble over night to the active detriment of these companies. It's why the "legal grey area" exists in the first place.
"What the hell is wrong with her eyes"
*scrolls down*
"What the everliving fuck is wrong with her right leg!?"
*scrolls down*
"What the everliving fuck is wrong with her right leg!?"
Yes. Moving on...
... actually, wait, no, not everyone. There's this Caddywompus dude...
I'm just glad someone finally has the courage to defend the massive companies from the insidious fan art creators
You're doing honest work. Fan art creators have had it too good for too long. The massive corporations have probably lost hundreds of dollars
Huh... I don't know much about this guy but considering he made Fairly Odd Parents and Danny Phantom, I assumed he wouldn't have to stoop to doing something like this.
OP
OP
Sadly plagiarism isn't even the worst he has done. Mentioned before, but he has shamed people with depression, propaganda about autism, etc.
The guy's an asshole, a hack, and a joke for asking to sell art of this quality for this price. But it is not tracing or plagiarism. He used someone else's fan art as a reference instead of official art. It's a weird look, but considering that people use official art as reference for work they sell all the time, I have a hard time getting mad about it.
Also this
You would think people paying want to be in his known style not a shitty copy of other art
Realistically for a name as big as Butch that's a great price. Sure you're just going to get a significantly worse version of one of the top google results of the character, but at this point with how well-documented his commission tendencies are anyone buying one is fully aware they're just paying for the name.