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Wow, Wizards really needs to better vet artists or indeed artwork at this point.
The more I look, the more these differ. Similar, for sure, but actually different. Can someone more familiar with what constitutes an infringement here chime in?
It looks to me like the mtg image used the figure from the Cyberpunk art as the base for the second figure, and made some slight changes.
So it would be unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted artwork for profit, if I'm not mistaken. Could also be that it was mostly regurgitated by an AI and used as a base, which at this point would be even worse for Wizards' PR I reckon.
It's probably conventional image manipulation. Despite the news, not everything is AI. The old techniques still work.
If you flip the art it becomes even more apparent. You can see the background follows a similar composition as well. Not sure if it would hold up in court as a one-off (assuming this is the only case of plagiarism), but certainly enough for WotC to drop the artist
Wow, I didn't catch the background.
Now I'm wondering if the other figure is lifted from somewhere too?
It's stolen from an old pulp magazine. The whole image is just a collage of stolen art 😂
Yup, I think only the axes and maybe the elf woman's arm are yet to be found at this point.
The flexed, unarmed arm is pretty sus.
Yeah true!
Im not an artist but it seems pretty obvious to me that one was copied directly from the other and drawn over.
If you instead compare the foreground figure with the background one on the card, you'll see that the art styles are fairly different. It becomes kind of obvious that the one in the back has been copy-pasted from the other artwork, then modified.
Wow Donato is a huge name/artist and long time MTG artist. This one is definitely not as egregious as others but I agree that the back arm and stairs (at least) are pretty damning, and the obvious other similarities aren’t helping.
Even if this was accidental, why she used reference art from such a well known artist in the same space is kinda strange, as is why she changed so little from it.
Magic art is so heavily scrutinized you'd think that even if they weren't honest they'd avoid it just on the likelihood of getting caught. Especially since it kills your rep as an artist and is going to make getting future jobs way harder.