When I originally illustrated this Troop, I didn’t MEAN to make a Piranha Plant. Really.
No, really. When OgreWare tasked me with creating a “killer plant” Troop illustration, this is what first came to mind. In years of illustrating, I’ve found that the first impression/idea is, if not the best, the one I usually end up going with regardless. So I went with this one from the start.
That, it turns out, was a mistake. Oh, OgreWare loved the Troop – that wasn’t the issue; the issue was that any average person could see that what I’d illustrated was, very clearly, a Piranha Plant character from some popular Nintendo games.
Sadly, I am not your average person. Video games were banned in my house the way cigarettes were: “When you’re eighteen, if you’re still stupid enough to waste your time and money on it, you can – but we are not buying you any.” For the record, on my eighteenth birthday, I did go out and buy a Nintendo DS Lite and Pokemon Diamond. But the damage, so to speak, had been done: I’d grown up, 18 years, in the 90’s and 2000’s, in America – without playing a single Super Mario or Super Mario Bros. game. At all. Ever.
This did not mean, however, that I’d never seen a Piranha Plant. Because here, just a few years later (okay, ten years later), I drew one unintentionally. But how this happened is still a bit of a mystery, even to me. Is it that the Piranha Plant’s design is so good – cute yet unique, simple yet striking – that it stuck in my mind when I saw it for a few minutes during one game at a friend’s house? Or is it that advertisements are frighteningly effective, and a TV commercial got the Piranha Plant into my head? Or, going a bit more metaphysical, did I subconsciously pick up on the collective subconscious’s idea of a “plant monster” and ascribe that insight to my imagination?
It doesn’t really matter. The fact is that this happens more frequently than most artists and designers would probably care to admit. Quite often I get an idea in my head and run with it, only to find that it’s actually a “rip-off” of another artist’s work. How this happens could be explained by any number of theories, some of which are listed above, but the fact is that we are often, in a small and unintentional way, plagiarizing someone else’s work.
There’s a great coffee-mug/bumper-sticker quote that I love: “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.” It refers to this idea in a more humorous, positive light: that everything has really been written/painted/designed already, and the best any of us can do is to put a unique twist on one of those already-been-written stories.
In essence, we’re all just remix artists, taking bits and pieces of what’s been done already and mixing them together into something new. Not entirely new, because we took the samples, the beat, etc. from other sources – but still, we are making something sort of new, putting a bit of ourselves into it.
I’m not defending the Killer Plant illustration, really – I’m just explaining this phenomenon of “unintentional plagiarism” and reassuring any other artists out there that yes, it happens. Just do a reasonable amount of research to make sure you’re not TOO close to any existing media, and you’ll be fine. And remember, there is no shame in being a remix artist. We all are.
So here, without further ado, is the Killer Plant troop, and its red variant, for which OgreWare decided to just go for it and make it REALLY look like a Piranha Plant…just to annoy me.
-Admin Taylor