mistergrundy:

vickorano:

It is not constructive and will almost always make the artist feel lame and un-original. Especially, for me personally, I feel like I’ve failed at the piece when someone tells me it reminds them of another character. I just don’t want to hear it.

You can tell the artist your emotions toward the…

I used to really hate these comments too, but, sometimes you just got to let stuff go. I know any time I’ve reacted in a negative way towards this sort of comment I’ve ended up really regretting it and feeling childish.

It is actually good feedback if you’re trying to avoid some kind of character type or whatever. They’ll tell you “looks like X” and you can look at it objectively. What about it is reminiscent of that thing? Should I change it or is it okay? And sometimes it is okay. I’ve a few characters that look like other characters and man, I dunno, they’re different enough that I don’t think anyone would get them confused when it came down to it. Sometimes it’s just funny. Someone pointed out to me that Phineas looks like the guy in Atlantis, and I find that rather amusing, actually, because of the personality differences. Also any blonde guy in glasses looks like that guy, anyway, haha.

You said it yourself, you’re self conscious, and reacting this way towards innocuous feedback really shows that, unfortunately. Feeling like you’re being framed for stealing is more like… projection on the commenter than how they actually feel about your work. They probably like your work. The internet isn’t shy about pointing about art stealin’ folk, you know?

Maybe they just don’t really know what to say about it, and the first thing that popped into their mind is that it reminds them of this other thing they like. It’s definitely not an attack on their part. You’ve a right to be offended by it, I guess, since at its heart they are sort of dumb comments to make, but they’re in no way aggressive.

I can see how it can annoy people to have their work compared to someone else’s work, but I personally find it useful. For one thing, no matter what image you make, it’s always going to remind someone of something else, because that’s what we as human beings do. We make connections and create similarities in our heads so that we can relate to the image.

If you look at that similar work, you can find inspiration in how they’ve created/portrayed them and let that feed into yours by taking things you like from that work, or noticing things you don’t like so that you can avoid that in the future. Also, you can look at other examples of that artists work and get even more inspiration.

For example, I created a couple of characters last year, and I was going for a Bruce Timm Batman sort of art style, but I was also trying to put my own spin on it so that it felt more like the characters were mine rather than some copy and paste job. However, one of my friends mentioned that they reminded him of Mike Mignola’s work. I was pleased that they thought my art looked like his work, because he was an artist whom I admired, but I had overlooked him in this project, so I then researched his work a lot which then heavily influenced how the characters turned out.

(Source: coffeeandcockatiels, via mistahgrundy)