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.
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 😂
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.
This artist thinks they’re the only personal allowed to draw a buff cyberpunk woman with a red Mohawk because they did it 4 years ago?
Go back to the '80s and you probably find hundreds of similar works. This is silly.
