Traced Artwork

The comic book adaptation tracing frames from the anime adaptation.

"Cases of visual plagiarism are very difficult to perform a good analysis on. Unlike with text plagiarism, there are no strings of matching text that you can cite as suspicious or prove actual copying. With images, unless the work was directly copied (IE: Traced, photographed, or otherwise duplicated) you have to base your analysis on more subjective elements."

— Jonathan Bailey, The Nick Simmons Plagiarism Scandal

Traced artwork is the act of drawing over the lines of a picture, either a photograph or different artwork, in order to effectively reuse it in another piece. Tracing is often called out in the community on the grounds of Plagiarism if the picture in question was found on the internet and belongs to someone else. Sometimes though, the original author will simply tell the tracer of their disappointment and not pursue legal battle.

However, it should be noted that tracing isn't always frowned upon, especially if the traced picture was taken by the artist themself. Due to how hard hands are to draw, beginner/amateur artists may take pictures of their own hands in the desired position, superimpose them onto their drawing and trace over them, though this might result in an inconsistent art style if they usually draw in, say, a very toony way. It might also be done to save time during a tight deadline, or if someone wants to learn something like color theory before, say, lineart and anatomy.

Tracing is considered an important part of learning how to draw, so it is not surprising that many works done by fans tend to trace from the source material. However, because of how many of these works are online, and the quality of those, we exclude fan-works from this article.

Traced artwork is pretty common in videogame adaptations, and downright normal when making character sheets.

Do not confuse with Homage Shot. Homage Shot is when a piece of artwork homages another with the same core idea, but not exactly the same layout. Sometimes tracers will excuse their actions under the pretense it "was a homage all along".

Compare Recycled Animation, when a work reuses animation to save time (though it's usually just straight-up reused instead of replicated). Also compare GIS Syndrome, when a work lifts pictures from Google Image Search.

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In-Universe examples:

Films — Live-Action

• Discussed in-universe in Chasing Amy; Banky works on a Comic Book as an inker, going over the pencil sketches Holden draws; one of the things that sets off his Hair-Trigger Temper is when people accuse him of being a "tracer". In the movie, when a douchebag collector keeps pestering him about it, Banky directly attacks him and ends screaming "Your mother's a tracer!"
  Banky: I'LL TRACE A CHALK LINE AROUND YOUR DEAD FUCKING BODY, YOU FUCK!

Video Games

• In D3's SIMPLE series detective attorney game The Trial, one of the cases Momota has to solve is about Paul, a fictional character from Show Within a Show anime The Stars, who is actually traced and modified from Kasuga, the mascot from the Kasugaya sweets shop. Momota the defense attorney must prove that the company who made the anime has plagiarized the shop mascot.

Tracing from the same brand:

Manga

• Dragon Ball Super. Toyotarō is known for taking the original Dragon Ball as a point of reference for his work, which includes the original manga and the anime adaptations. See here for a gallery of these. Here's a list of references that, in context, cannot be interpreted as homage shots.
  • A panel of Frost's reaction to pain is traced from Goku's reaction to pain from Chapter 197 of Dragon Ball (or Chapter 3 of the DBZ VIZ Select edition).
  • A panel of Goku and Fused Zamasu about to strike their fists is identical to a frame of Gogeta fighting Omega Shenron in Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi by Shinichi Kurita and corrected by Tadayoshi Yamamuro.
  • A panel from both Chapter 33 and Chapter 38 have Jiren and Kefla going out against other fighters. The panel is identical to one from Jiya, written by Akira Toriyama and illustrated by Masakazu Katsura.

Comic Books

• Issues 15 and 16 drawn by artist Todd Wahnish in the Sonic X comic book adaptation are known in the community from tracing from the anime. Other artists, Tracey Yardley among them, don't have this issue.
• Most of the art done by artist Michael Higgins in issue 92 of Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) is traced from previous issues. Proof here. Higgins remained on the series for a while, but only working as an inker.

Literature

• The second Warrior Cats artist, Owen Richardson, re-used many of his own images and poses. This was particularly noticed in the 2023 "Updated and Expanded" edition of The Ultimate Guide, where Raggedstar was a flipped edit of Graystripe from Graystripe's Vow, Scourge was originally Tall Shadow from the cover of The First Battle, Crookedstar is Sol from Eclipse, and Brightheart was originally Daisy from A Warrior's Choice.

Video Games

• The videogame adaptation of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders, Jojos Bizarre Adventure Heritage For The Future, naturally reuses the artwork of its source material to adapt the characters' portraits. However, the character of Midler, who is The Ghost in the manga as she never appears physically, was redesigned by Hirohiko Araki in order to be properly adapted in the game. Her artwork is traced from Yukako Yamagishi from the sequel work, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable. See here◊ and here◊.

Web Videos

• The artwork of An Eggman Carol, a short parody of A Christmas Carol by the Youtube channel of Sonic the Hedgehog, redraws artwork from the website Sonic Channel.

Western Animation

• SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Fun-Believable", all the images of Rube used as scene transitions are traced from frames in his debut appearance, "No Pictures Please".

Tracing from other people's work (only cited examples):

Manga

• The artwork of Eden no Hana by Yuki Suetsugu got criticized for tracing the art of Slam Dunk and Vagabond, both by Takehiko Inoue. The tracing led to the cease of distribution of Eden No Hana and the cancellation of Suetsugu's other manga, Silver.
• The artist of the manga adaptation of Dragon Ball Super, Toyotarō, got caught in a controversy when users online discovered the collaborative cover he did for V-Jump was traced from a Captain America illustration by Dexter Soy, from Captain Marvel: First Flight. Rather than pursuing legal action, Dexter Soy would find himself confused over why Toyotaro would trace from his work. Neither Toyotaro nor Shueshia have ever given a comment regarding this situation.
• The manga Prism was quietly cancelled after tracing accusations. The author confirmed he did took inspiration from multiple (Not safe for work) photos.

Arts

• Roy Lichtenstein, one of the major figures of the Pop Art movement, made a career out of taking individual panels from comic books and recreating them on a much larger scale with paint on canvas. He freely admits to the copying, naming his source in each work's description, and justifies this as intertextuality and recontextualizing. However, many comic book artists consider Lichtenstein's work plagiarism at best and art theft at worst, arguing that his pieces aren't transformative enough to qualify as original.
• Erró is a Pop Artist who blatantly copies from comic books, cartoons, advertisements, and so on. Unlike Lichtenstein, Erró usually transforms his work by combining multiple sources into bizarre collages. Usually. There was an incident where he based a piece on some Tank Girl cover art by Brian Bollard, with minimal alterations. Upon seeing the finished piece, Bollard wrote an open letter calling out Erró as a plagiarist—and Erró's agent conceded the point by removing that particular print from sale.
• Glenn Brown went through a period where he created scaled-up duplications of cover art from old sci-fi books. This article has a few examples of his work side-by-side with their "inspirations". Anthony Roberts even sued Brown for plagiarism (after Brown's The Loves of Shepherds 2000 copied Roberts' cover art for Robert Heinlein's Double Star), though the results of that suit are unknown.
• Fatima Pecci Carou, an Argentinean artist, traced this drawing of Sunset Shimmer by Japanese artist Agaberu and actually sold it to a museum. This accusation opened the floodgates and, apparently, a good number of her work is traced from fan artists. Naturally, Carou claims it's not plagiarism but "aesthetic references of characters" and is insisting the plagiarism claims are "political and psychological violence against her because she's a woman." She's since added a statement to the top of her website that insists her style of artwork "is constructed by taking visual and sound elements from different sources" — in other words it's not "traced" but "appropriated from a variety of sources" to "propose an aesthetic, conceptual and communication resignification"... and most certainly without crediting, sourcing, or compensating the original artists it was "appropriated" from.
• Rob Granito, an "artist" who made a living selling "original" artwork based on comic book characters at conventions, is infamous for three things: blatantly tracing other people's work, taking credit for work he's never done, and having an entire Facebook group devoted to him named "Rob Granito is a Fraud".

Comic Books

• The comic book series Incarnate by Nick Simmons, son of Gene Simmons from KISS, got caught in a plagiarism scandal in 2009. Simmon's work was caught up tracing artwork from Bleach, Hellsing, and other pieces of work like a Deviantart picture. The comic book series was cancelled, Nick Simmons apologized for his actions, and Tite Kubo published his thoughts on Twitter, being more bothered by the fact Nick Simmons tried to be a comic book artist.
• Comic book artist Greg Land is infamous for tracing images from photography◊, other comic books◊, and even his own prior work◊. Most notably are the tracings that are obviously taken from◊ pornography◊, which critics find to be extremely silly. No legal battle has ever been known to take place regarding his practice.
• Salvador Larroca has a similar notorious reputation for tracing stuff (to the point where his work is often mistaken for Greg Land's) from the likes of movie screenshots, fan models of spaceships◊, and even memes◊.
• Batman co-creator Bob Kane was a notorious tracer either repurposing poses from books and other comic strips and changing them to Batman. To just outright just copying panels altogether. A large collection of examples were collected via DialBforBlog

Literature

• Warrior Cats:
  • Some of the cats in illustrator Wayne McLoughlin's artwork, including from the cover of Twilight and illustrations in Cats of the Clans, appear to have been traced from photos copyrighted by Dorling Kindersley that appeared in various editions of their Eyewitness Cat book. Although this was noticed by fans, no legal issues came of it.
  • At least one image from the public domain is known to have been traced by illustrator Owen Richardson.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: Main Page 17 (themed after the anime-spoofing 20X6 universe) features a brief appearance from a Sailor Moon-style equivalent of Marzipan. Her pose◊ appears to have been traced directly from a piece of stock art of Sailor Moon herself.

Web Comics

• Sophie Labelle, the creator of the web comic Assigned Male, found herself in hot water after it was leaked that she used a real life picture of a toddler to trace for diaper fur art.

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