China Steals Military Artwork, Too
Beijing ripped off the F-35B, the Su-27 ... and the box art for a model kit?
Uncategorized August 29, 2015 Matthew Gault
China has a bad habit of stealing foreign military designs. Beijing’s J-11 fighter jet is a copy of Russia’s Su-27 and its new J-18 jump jet might be a rip-off of the American F-35B.
Now it seems one Chinese company even stole military artwork.
Recently, an artist named Wayne Scarpaci noticed something odd. Scarpaci paints beautiful pictures of trains and ships. His artwork appears in galleries, book covers and as the box art for model kits.
Here’s his painting of the USS Tennessee — a World War II-era battleship — for the Blue Ridge model company.
Now, here’s the box art for the Chinese-manufactured Trumpeter-brand USS Tennessee model kit.
Think they look similar? Trumpeter’s box art is a sleeker, stripped down version of Scarpaci’s painting. It seems as if, at the very least, Trumpeter used Scarpaci’s painting as the basis for its box art. The position of the crane and background images as well as the shadows are exactly the same.
Trumpeter’s box art is doubly weird because it doesn’t seem as if the company just ran Scarpaci’s artwork through some Photosohop filters. Someone took the time to repaint the same image in a different style.
The artist isn’t having it and he took to Facebook to point out the theft.
Here is the rip-off of my artwork of Trumpeter Models of China’s latest release of their 1/700 scale USS Tennessee. Notice any similarities? And I, of course, have zero recourse here. They never ever bothered to contact me, or even offer me a free kit, let alone any payment. But you can help! Please take the time to email them and tell them what you think of this. Here is their email address: [email protected]. And thank you all for taking time to do this …
What do you think, readers? Did Trumpeter make off with Scarpaci’s work … or is it just a coincidence?