Blast from the past

Looking for a Father's Day card in my card drawer meant looking at everything in the drawer, and brought up the question: am I ever going to use all those cards? Some are now bagged up to take along to the charity shop - but the drawer is still full...

In an envelope were some of the cut-paper cards I made in, hmm, it must be the 1980s - cut freehand out of layers of folded tissue paper. I loved the cutting, but the glueing was another matter. Look what time has done to the glue -On the right, some cutting that hasn't been stuck down. There's potential for another half-dozen cards - will I ever get around to making them? Meanwhile, they're back in the drawer.

This one, torn paper from an unglossy weekend magazine, was made in the 90s, inspired by some illustrations in New Scientist. The larger pieces were much easier to glue down -
I no longer have the original illustrations (or maybe I do, "somewhere") so it's hard to know if this was "inspired by" or simply "copied from" that source. Where does one end and the other start - when does inspiration revert to copying, or copying take flight into originality? The paper-cuts might seem a more clear-cut case of "inspired by" - I definitely was making up my own motifs - but again there's a limited range of motifs to get "that look" - so, is it copying? Or does the action of "my" hand make it original - to me, at least - even though it's part of a corpus of work with "that look"...

Anyway, what's wrong with copying? For centuries it was the way artists learned their trade. Even now, trying to copy a work by a master painter, say, will give you insight - which you can apply to your "original", saleable art.