When was plagiarism ever okay, and where does one draw the line between reference and tracing? There is a huge debate on the internet discussing these very points in conjunction with an up and coming artist, Mijn Schatje.

Mijn is an international artist who has received much acclaim for her digital vector art, with some of her prints retailing for upwards of $1700 each. It has come to light over the course of the past week that she has in fact been tracing over original photography, and claiming the whole completed image as a product of her own imagination. The photographs that she has been pilfering are from a very small, but growing community of collectors and manufacturers of Asian Ball Jointed Dolls. When first confronted with these accusations, she claimed to have never seen a photo of these dolls that looked like her art, but later recanted and claimed to have used some pictures from personal friends with permission. This claim has been proven to be false, by way of a great collaborative effort on the part of the BJD community to track down the original pictures and create overlays of those along with her art so that others can make a decision for themselves.

Austin Texas has been one of the fore-front cities in the US for introducing BJDs to the mass public thanks to Kerbey Lane Doll Shoppe and the Japanese doll company Volks partnering in 2004 for the Super Dollfie Convention. At that convention, Volks saw the mass demand for their unique fine art quality dolls, and opened their eyes to bringing their products to the US.

More information as well as the overlays can be found at: [link]

Join the discussion at: [link]

Written for and submitted to the Austin American Statesman, the Austin Chronicle and NPR.org

---- this was written by a friend on LJ and is x-posted in her journal: [link]

This kind of photo tracing and giving no credit to the artist just irritates the fuck out of me. the artist in question keeps changing her story about how she was inspired... but never wants to admit that the works are not coming from her own head. It's one thing to use photo reference, photo retouching your own photos, or using stock imagery... it's another to take someone else's photographs of yet another person's sculptures(since that's what a doll IS when you get down to it), trace it, not ask permission of the original artists, and then claim the work is your own.

I know that DA's position on this is shaky and has a lot of loopholes, but this is just crap. The artist is a professional, and her behavior is anything but.