How to Inspire Your Followers

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I traced over photographs to create the art for Basic Instructions. I thought it might be fun to explain what images I used to create the rare, more ambitious images, like the one in panels two and three of this strip.

The image is a composite of several different traced elements. Adobe Illustrator made it easy to hand-trace the part of an image I wanted and have that tracing isolated as a single element, which I could then easily combine with others in a sort of image sandwich.

Working from the back forward, this image consists of: a black rectangle, a tracing of NASA’s “Earthrise” photo, a crude drawing of rolling, gray hills, the screen of an antique Philco Predicta television which I stretched at the middle to make the screen and the base pedestal wider, The Emperor of the moon cut to fit the screen, and on top, a rough tracing of Fremen warriors taken from a screengrab of a single frame from the film DUNE.

It’s my understanding that this constitutes a “transformative work,” and is perfectly legal.  Luckily, even if that’s not the case, my limited art skills renders all of the elements unrecognizable enough to not infringe copyrights.

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