original character! do not steal!

Well, when you draw - not saying that I do, but I have a few friends who do draw - an original character, you try to give them a personality, something that makes them cool. Tragic past, undefeatable spirit, whatever, but I can assure you that at least 90% of the characters you find in the internet, no matter if they're original or not, have "life". Maybe it's not written down on paper. But they all have that little something that makes them unique.

Right, but you're not taking the artist's thoughts about the drawing, you're taking the drawing. It'd set that a fair distance from consciously taking an existing character ie Reiko Hinomoto and porting her bodily into this forum, particularly because it's not like you have access to the thoughts and feelings of someone that you might know by their deviantart username, if you bother to look at it before saving the pic.

It's not like you have access to the thoughts and feelings of someone

Speak for yourself " title="Razz" />

I get your point. I know that 'original' characters dont have a public defined personality or stuff, but I insist. Artists wont draw a psycho-looking woman with a machine gun and describe her as the most loving person in the world. What I mean is that, most of the times, you can get an idea of what the artist was trying to create by the looks of the characters. A cool hero, a vengeful assassin or a lovely kid. They all have that something that allows you to tell what kind of character it was meant to be.

Agreed, agreed, of course I chose the pic for Taylor because it best suited her out of the pics I had access to at the time. But having a picture of someone and thinking 'this person looks weird' is much more nebulous territory than having a picture of a character whose weirdness is clearly defined. There's wiggle room with a pic, there isn't nearly as much with a character. For example, you can take a given pic and write the history (you don't look at a picture and say "oh this girl looks like she graduated from a private high school in idaho in 2006 and thought about attending Berkley before her table tennis career took off!). If you have a character with an existing history, you run the risk of being, among other things, corrected. And to me being told how to write my own characters is a fate worse than death.

What a bizarre little discussion we're having here. " title="Razz" />

*Nodnod* Agree to that.

Anyways, my point is, I dont believe there's such a thing like a blank character. You can always "reset" them, but as I said, you cant make an honorable father and bussiness man out of a kid's picture. As long as you stay in the gamma of posibilities that the appearance allows, I dont see any problem in using original pictures.

This may be a change of subject, but I'm old enough now that it seems weird to have had this discussion with someone your age. A large part of my brain will tell you that I'm still a teenager, and I'm afraid that the more it is exposed to teenage-ism, the more likely it is to escape the elaborate maze I've trapped it in.

You can see the risk I'm taking here in this thread.

[quote="Bluemouse":4x17d76c]This may be a change of subject, but I'm old enough now that it seems weird to have had this discussion with someone your age. A large part of my brain will tell you that I'm still a teenager, and I'm afraid that the more it is exposed to teenage-ism, the more likely it is to escape the elaborate maze I've trapped it in.

You can see the risk I'm taking here in this thread.