Lumaxart2d’s Gold Guys and the iPhone
Now, don't get me wrong. I am totally digging the work of Scott Maxwell (aka lumaxart2d), and his Gold Guy series is definitely top-notch. So before I continue, I just want to clarify that I'm not pouring on the hate.
However, this image (and a crapload others just like it) caught my attention recently while I was browsing Dreamstime searching for some royalty-free images for my latest project. It's just like any other Gold Guy image - cute and clever...but...how the hell did he get an entire series of iPhone images past the reviewers?!
I was specifically looking for touch-screen images of mobile phones a while ago, and I contacted an admin at Dreamstime to see if they could arrange that. Their response was short and sweet: the design of the iPhone is copyrighted, and therefore not allowed to be sold as stock. Hrmph...that shut me up for a while, until I saw this image a few days ago.
So what's the scoop? Lumaxart2d is definitely one of the top contributors at Dreamstime at the time of this writing, so is there some sort of special "club" for these types of members? I don't know. I'm not a contributor, so it doesn't bother me all that much. But it does strike me a little odd that there is this much inconsistency at a stock photo site as large as Dreamstime.
Okay, that's my rant for the day.
LuMaxArt and his famous Gold Guys
So apparently there is a huge set of “Gold Guy” characters created by a guy named Scott Maxwell from Hawaii, and he goes by the name of “LuMaxArt2d”. Not sure why he tagged the “2d” on the end of his name, as his entire portfolio contains gobs of 3d goodness. Essentially, his “Gold Guy” collection consists of tens of thousands simple gold (duh) characters posing with a variety of objects, and they are quite useful for blogs and websites and books, and, and…well…you get the idea.
I’m curious though – what’s next? He’s been building this collection of Gold Guys for years, and I can sense that he has some rather strong 3d modeling capabilities. And like all high-profile designers, he keeps a really low profile. His website hasn’t been updated in months (as of this writing), but he does submit new images to microstock sites like dreamstime and shutterstock on a regular basis.
Maybe living in Hawaii causes laziness? Heck, I’d be a freakin’ sloth if I lived in Hawaii…
