• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

If Traveller ships were to look like this......

I'm about to got under some people's skin, and I've mentioned this on other threads before, but, in my opinion, there's been a lot of unwarranted praise heaped on one or both of the Keiths in their pilfering of other sci-fi artists.

The most notorious, in my opinion at least, was the starport hotel module, where a conceptual city scape painted by Syd Mead was copied, sketched over, had one or two tweaks done to it, and then used as the cover art for the booklet of miniature deckplans.

He did the same thing for one of the Solomani ships in the Solomani alien module which was based on the B-Wing from Star Wars, and also ripped off another fighter craft from one of the Stewart Cowley books, which itself was a licensed publication of various sci-fi book cover art.

The BSG thing escaped me too, but I think the Luke Skywalker pic seemed familiar. Why is it these guys can't come up with their own poses and situations for artwork?
 
So I am rather hoping for complex ships to appear in Traveller that are akin to the Nostromo to make more of an appearance over the wedges.

I'll second that. Less wedges. More Leviathan class-ish vessels.









I can't see the other one...the tripod image. It's blank for me. Just a white page with the tripod logo in the left hand corner.
 
As for creativity, the above examples show a total lack of it. The SW one is pretty obviously a tracing. Anybody can do that. And there are plenty of other similar examples as have been raised in past threads on the subject. Not that such copying is bad, it's a time honoured tradition of students of art to copy the masters to develop their talent. Selling such copies is where things get interesting.

Actually, it is a standard artisitc practice to borrow and steal, and it has an honourable history. In fact, in some eras it has been compulsory!

However, modern artists and illustrators will often use previous work for inspiration, and will lift poses and facial features. An out and out copy is probably a bit cheeky, especially of someone else's illustration, but using a photograph as a basis is not, or shouldn't be, an issue.

Art galleries are full of work like that. It's not as if Andy Warhol actually took the photos used in his prints of Marylin and the rest. Or Roy Lichtenstein's paintings.

The trick, as an artist, is to make the work your own, even if you are using other's work as your foundation. Check out Arthur Ranson's work for 2000AD and others. He pretty clearly uses all sorts of phots, but he owns the results fully.

What will be interesting is that court case over that famous painting of Obama adopted as a poster. The artist took the image from, I think, an AP photograph, and they were sueing him over infringement of copyright. Not sure how that is panning out, or whether it's even been heard yet.
 
Left field comment,
The ships in Scoundrels fit the vague drift of this topic, not wedgy, all of the fine detail type that the blurry painting type. I like them.
 
Back
Top