Mona Lisa? Actually *I* Painted That.

Since I started learning to draw I found a few tutorials by an artist called Jeremy Farlow who’s work I really admire. I mean this guy has got some serious talent.

Then today I was just skimming through drawing videos on youtube and stumbled across something that really pissed me off.

Basically some random guy was using youtube to show off his ‘drawing skills’ by capturing his screen to video while he ‘draws’ on his tablet.

Can you guess what he was really doing?

That’s right. He took one of Jeremy Farlow’s drawings and just filmed himself tracing it…while claiming it was his own original work and that he was drawing it from scratch. You can tell it’s a tracing because the drawing is just way too close to the original to be a hand-drawn copy…especially considering he didn’t erase or have to redo anything even once.

It’s easy enough to do. Just put a piece of paper with artwork on it over the top of your tablet and the paper is thin enough to where the tablet will detect the stylus through it.

I’ve done it myself (only with my own work) to digitally ink something before I had a scanner.

This video simultaneously pissed me off and totally baffled me.

Firstly it pissed me off simple because someone was ripping off artwork by an artist I admire and passing it off as my own.

It baffled me because I just thought “Why would anyone want to do this?”

I looked at the guy’s youtube profile and there were literally dozens of videos of his so-called ‘drawings’, more than a few I recognized and the rest were obviously not by him either.

How do I know the others weren’t his? Because you draw by sketching and refining. This guy can somehow start from the bottom of a drawing, work his way up and get everything absolutely perfect and in proportion the first time with no erasing. Not even professional artists can do that. Even Jeremy Farlow, the guy who’s work he was stealing doesn’t draw like that…he does what all artists do. A gesture sketch for the pose, roughing in the muscles and features, refining and then refining even more when he inks it.

The other big this is that if he could actually draw that well, he wouldn’t be attempting to pass other artists work off as his own.

So this guy, rather than actually learning to draw, instead traces other people’s work, calls them his own, just so people can comment on his youtube videos and tell him how awesome he is.

I just don’t understand that mentality. I mean, I could post pictures by professionals here and claim I did them myself…but I wouldn’t get any satisfaction from it at all because I’d know they weren’t mine and I was just being a liar.

Yep, I think it’s pretty self-evident that this guy is a massive douche.