From Russia With Love
I received a great email today from a fellow caricaturist/illustrator who hails from Russia, telling me a story of how he got inspired to draw caricatures as a kid by a series of stickers featuring caricature art that came in packages of chewing gum:
That is pretty cool. . . except of course that these stickers are all examples of copyright infringement. There are a lot of my old, OLD caricature samples, as well as a John Kascht, a Sebastian Kr?¬?ger, what I think is a Ben Burgraff and two (Hugh Grant and Gerard Depardieu) that look familiar but I do not recognize the artist. The copyright theft is not this person’s fault, of course. Possibly the highest compliment you can receive as an artist is when someone says you were one of those whose work inspired them to become an artist themselves.
By the way, the artist who sent me this is Ilia “Kunicz” Shubin, and he does some terrific work which you can see here.
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Hi Tom,
For information, the Depardieu’s one was drawn by the famous Jean Mulatier. He is a great french caricaturist.
Another thing : i got the “Mad art of Caricatures”. Great book ! Sometime, I don’t understand all because I don’t speak very well english 🙁 but with a good dictionnary …! And the drawings explain well too.
Tom, as I’m sure you’re aware, I see swipes of your work and other famous caricaturists all the time when I seek out live caricaturists when I go on vacation. Sometimes its literally a photocopy, other times they’ve redrawn it. Often the samples hanging around their booths are in wildly different styles (which in turn are completely different than the caricaturist’s style) so it’s obvious it’s not their work. I’ll sometimes pull up the real drawing on my phone and show my wife while we’re standing in front of the samples. I’ve never confronted an artist over it though. Usually they are accomplished artists in their own right, and I think some are simply showing the public samples of caricatures in general, and aren’t necessarily trying to take credit for them. So I’m not sure of the ethics of that. Of course the example of swiping you’ve used in this blog post is definitely unethical.
Unbelievable… o__O
By the way, Hugh Grant’s caricature was drawn by Joan Vizcarra, spanish caricaturist.
Hey Tom remember that i send you some pictures of your work a long time ago i dont know what happen but they changed it, maybe they had some copyright matters.
I saw some other images of your work in other place i have to go there and take some pcitures. Take care.