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“The best imitation in the world is not half as good as a poor original.” - Luise Rainer, actress.

This month’s discussion relates to an experience I had recently.  I was looking at the work of an illustrator whom I admire tremendously, and I thought, “I want to try and draw in their style!”

I spent time looking at their work and trying to imitate their brush strokes, line weight, and the way they applied color. My results were pretty terrible. The problem was that I was trying to force my natural hand-eye movements to behave like someone else’s, with no true familiarity with the way that person attacks their work, moves their tools based on impulse or control, or how they think during the creative process.

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In other words, I was abandoning my own naturally developed technique and trying to mimic someone else’s and it just didn’t work. It was like trying to take a train on a familiar route right off the tracks and putting it on a whole new set of tracks to get to the same destination. That just doesn’t work and will only derail the train, which is what it did to me. It derailed my normal process, my style, and even my confidence when I saw the results.

Still, my tenacity kicked in and I spent the next few days studying that other illustrator’s work, learning the brush strokes and the little details that I hadn’t paid attention to, before. After a week or so, I finally nailed it. I looked at my results and while I could still see remnants of my own work in the drawing, it was as close as I could get to recreating someone else’s work. For me, this was a fun exercise to see if I could simply draw like the artist I admired so much. For better or worse, I could. This wasn’t the first time I’d tried this, though, it was a long time since the last time.

Back when I was a kid in school, I used to copy and imitate my favorite artists from Mad Magazine, Peanuts and Snoopy, and I loved tracing photographs, all which helped me to learn how to control my tools, learn perspective, and to see how things like value and color range worked.  It was an invaluable way to learn and help develop my naturally emerging skills, and it’s an excellent method that I still recommend, today.

And while it’s acceptable to imitate another person’s work so we can learn from it, it’s not acceptable to imitate another person’s work, adopt their entire style, and claim it as our own, with no recognition to the person who created that style – it’s known as stealing or plagiarizing, and is not well received in any field.

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