The Space Swimmers 4
- SPACE SWIMMERS 4 - A black ink and gray pencil drawing on an 11 x 14 size vellum paper. It appears in the paperback, "The Space Swimmers," by Gordon R. Dickson, Published by Ace, 1979
This drawing was done without looking into my reference files for background shapes or underwater ship shapes for inspiration. I try not to use my reference files unless my mind is completely blank and needs stirring.
Reference files are sometimes referred to as "swipe" files by pessimists.
But no illustrator can be expected to retain detailed visual memories of the millions of objects that exist. Virgil Finlay used lots of Hollywood film stills of famous actors and actresses for some of his illustrations; you can recognize John Derek, Rita Hayworth, Raymond Massey, and others, in them. It would have been easy for Finlay to alter their features so their identity was not so obvious, but for some reason he didn't care to. Perhaps because what he did was not "copying," those photos were used as "models," which is different from copying, or what is called swiping.
"Swiping" is when one illustrator directly copies another artist's work. Back in the early days of comic books, there was lots of swiping going on. Whoever drew "Hawkman" in some of those early issues obviously copied many of his figures from Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon Sunday newspaper strip.
Although swiping is a no-no, I've never heard of an illustrator being sued for it. However, in the mainstream art world it's called "forgery," and is treated far more seriously.
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