For those who are not in Richards Monday night studio class we are currently working on a WPA style poster. While browsing the Internet for examples of WPA posters I stumbled upon Eric Tan. Eric is a designer from San Diego that creates interesting retro inspired posters and also dabbles in designer toy making. The majority of his work on his website is his fun and unique movie poster remakes from Disney Pixar. His design style can be explained as a modern interruption of art deco. I personally believe that his artwork is so enjoyable because of its simplicity. The objects being illustrated are very bare boned WPA style with very little detail. Tan’s color schemes are very strong because of his choice in fundamentally proven primary, monochromatic, and analogous colors. I could not actually find if he had the permission from the companies/copy right holders to recreate and sell his posters. I find myself wishing to see his posters printed by using screen printing and removing it from the digital realm. So my question to all of you is what is your opinion about and if you think it is right to use copyrighted/ trademarked objects in your artwork with out the permission of the company/artist? And if his posters were done by hand using retro printing processes instead of digital would it still be successful as his digital originals?check out his blog at: http://erictanart.blogspot.com/
Personally I dislike someone profiting off of someone else's intellectual property. If the final product is far enough away from the original, it bothers me much less. And if it's the property of a large corporation that a smaller artist is profiting off of, well that bothers me even less. If it's the other way around, and a big company was thieving from a small artist, I'd rage. It just depends on the situation for me, though technically it's all stealing and stealing is wrong. Does anyone know any of the legalities involved in this? I've seen artists profit off of Mickey Mouse before, for example, and not get in trouble. I've also seen Hot Topic rip off some kid's picture from their DeviantArt account, and the kid got the company to discontinue the product. There's a blog called "You Thought We Wouldn't Notice," that documents and discusses IP theft like that. (http://youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com/blog3/)
ReplyDeleteAs for the second question, he could definitely do these as a screen print and they'd turn out much nicer than anything laser printed. To me, you just can't beat the look and feel of the ink once it's printed. It's a bit more time-consuming than other methods of printing, however, so I can see why he might not want to bother with it.