Way back, during Napoleon's invasion of Russia, an artist named George Dawe, painted 329 portraits of Russian Generals active during that period. In this series, the artist has used the magic of photoshop and has managed to achieve a lot of appreciation.
I know what you thinking...copyright violation! Right?
Here's what the artist has to say about it:
"I found a bunch of images online, faithful photographic reproductions of original artwork by George Dawe. He was an English portrait artist who lived in St Petersburg in 1819. He was commissioned to paint portraits of Russian Generals who had successfully fought Napoleon in the Patriotic War of 1812 and over a nine year period he completed over 300 of them.
Luckily for me the two dimensional works of art are in the public domain because the copyright has expired (under UK law this typically means the author died over 70 years ago) this means they can be used as a basis for a derivative work without permission.
The Copyright Office has stated that digitising an already existing work doesn’t create a copyrightable derivative work. Digitised versions are copies, and their copyright status depends on that of the pre-existing work. Therefore all photographic reproductions are also considered to be in the public domain. The work I’m creating is classified as ‘derivative work’ additionally, provided it is significantly different to the original work the derivative work will be subject to copyright in it’s own right, and I will own copyright to the new content that I have created."
Here are some of my favorite portraits:
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