So the online game I’m playing is holding a contest. Basically players would design costumes they want to see in the game (hair, hat, clothes, stuff like that) and post their images on their Google form. The winners will be announced on their social media and may have a chance to see their costumes being made in the game. And one rule is that designs must not plagiarize/infringe copyrights of “others” that’s all what they say.

I have been having a little fantasy of seeing some kind of noble costume in the game. So I designed a costume that is supposed to be a cartoon version of an 18th-century naval officer. I was kind of inspired to make it by an in-game costume of a pirate. The pirate costume was a rare costume that could only be obtained from a special game way back when I wasn’t a player. Only a handful of players have the costume and it is rarely seen anywhere, though you can still see it on the game’s older trailer.

This is what I ended up designing

And this is what the pirate costume looks like, from a fan wiki

As you can see, I drew my design by taking screenshots from the game and the wiki, then drawing a layer on top of the screenshots. I had to do it because I wanted to scale my design to match the game’s graphics.

As a result, I can see quite some similarities between my costume and the pirate costume, especially the coat and the hat. Yeah, I drew my coat and hat on top of the pirate ones, but that was because I had to make sure my design could be realistically implemented in the game. I had no intention to copy the pirate costume as my own. But does it look like that from the outside? Would it look to you like I’m stealing the design of someone else for my costume? Or could all the similarities be explained away that back in the day pirates and navy officers basically had similar clothing? :D

Topics: clothing, art, drawing, design, plagiarism