There has been a growing amount of people calling out artists for too closely copying others’ work. Its been seen more in the realm of comic covers but now it has popped up in Pokemon.
The official statement is that the Pokemon Company gave them the wrong research materials. This doesnt seem likely for how close it is.
So I wanted to bring it up to get everyones thoughts about artistic integrity. What are your thoughts on Ai, “tracing”, referencing, repeating CG models, etc?
Well, from what I see it seems definitely traced. It’s a big no-no if you’re a pro artist, especially when working for a billion $ company.
While I can understand the tight schedule and difficulties associated, we’re not talking about a random ig or DeviantArt artist, and it’s pretty lame to profit from others work.
The wrong research material sounds like an excuse, the criticism is fair imho
I agree. “ The wrong research materials". This is just so weak. What does that mean? Did they ask the artist to create this mock? It is really sad. In the day of AI generating art from actual artist. Now is TPC asking actual artist to do the same? I’m not sure how this accidentally happens. Sometimes I inadvertantly have an idea that is similar to another artist. Art like stories often repeats itself. It is inevitable. Such a close rendition is totally sus. The original artist should be compensated. Pokemon has a huge low viz fan art base. Look at the e4 art contest. These people create Pokemon art from their harts and souls. Pokemon owns the copyright identity, not the creative expression. They should pay the original artist to provide “research material “ . Yet, TPC has been treating artist poorly since 1995. Other TCGs allow the artist to own their creations and profit from them. Not TPC. Arita(any Pokemon TCG artist) can not profit from their Pokemon creations, nor can any other Pokemon artist. .They sign all creative rights over to TPC . IMO . It’s exploitation. Yet I’ m an American. My POV is different
Damn. Imagine being a relatively underground artist who pours hours and hours into your artwork, and someone else swoops in and profits from it. Im glad that the original artist had a platform where the plagiarism was addressed
Even if the Pokémon company gave reference materials, artists shouldn’t be tracing 1:1 unless it was some sort of nod to the past artist.
If it was indeed the artist being lazy and copying, I would hope Pokémon halts business with the artist.
edit for TL;DR
TL;DR 
yeah I saw Rattle’s video on it. What concerned me was reading the video comments. A lot of people fundementally seem to not understand what happened here. Commonly people keep saying that because you made fan art of the intellectual property of someone else’s that therefore your work belongs to them. I fear for how absolutely clueless an alarming percentage of the population seems to be. I don’t know how things go for Japanese laws on ownership of works and creative liberty, but culturally this is no less than absolutely shameful and a black mark for the artists doing the tracing. Tracing is often done by people for practice, but in japan, trace overs has been a long standing issue. A rather notious use of tracing was in the American show boondocks of all things. But you could call it parody in that case because that show was entirely about parody. So sometimes context matters.
Overall, in this situation, pokemon are the ones with the power here and no real excuses. They have made this new product, they didn’t have to decide to pump out so much stuff for this digital collectathon. They could have in the first place, just you know…made it a literal 1 to 1 of the actual TCG and just used tcg art and tied it in. The thing that miffed many of us to start with. They have lots of artists now and have been able to pay people plenty well for art. I really think the blame lies in two places, primarily with the artist. Secondarily, the pokemon company, if pushing too much work on artists, they should not. In the end you are paying for the art, so just pay more artists to lighten the work load. If they like this artist whose work the other artist traced, then they could have offered them work too. At this point the situation is soured, and I don’t think reaching out and offering them to do official art would exactly go over well. I know I’d probably tell them to shove it where the sun don’t shine…
To me, the easiest solution is to work out monetary compensation to the artist whose work was traced, and then in the illustrator notes, add in their name as co-author, or, if the artist wishes, remove the art altogether.
One thing Rattle brought up, is that since this is digital, yes its easier to solve. But what if this was a physical card, now what? There must be a far more lax culture with the people in charge of the digital card collectathon application. I feel like the actual card game would do better here. But after the debacle with the recent illustration contest and how they somehow didn’t notice the same person entered a bunch of AI under multiple similar names gives me pause…
I think this speaks to a long standing and growing issue with the greater pokemon company in general. They are pushing out way too much stuff in general in too short a time span. The amount of times I’ve heard people beg them to slow down development of the videogames to make them better over the better part of a decade now grows with each game title. The same with the TCG is true too. Card sets have increased in number and in size, ballooning so far out of control, and I always see people saying to not print so much junk or bulk, to slim down sets in general, cool it on the insanely low pull rates for high rarity cards, and even lower the amount of junk bulk per pack generally(in english/western releases anyhow). Before I hopped back into the tcg I was funnily enough, big on importing stuff from the Japanese PC, and the rate of merchindise they put out has gone way up too.
Maybe its just become a beast, too big and unwieldy to slow down and keep eyes on things in a more controlled environment. Due to many factors, I don’t doubt we will see this again. And while I am convinced it would take a lot to tarnish any aspect of pokemon to the point of actually wounding the brand, the more this happens, the more sour its most ardent and long-suffering fans during the “unpopular” period will turn away entirely, or at best, only engage with old stuff on the secondhand market. Thats an extrapolation of an extrapolation though, lets hope this just gets solved right, and doesn’t happen again.
/postzilla 
What does this mean? Clueless? I think most of us get it. Fundamentally what happened was a paid TPC artist stole another artist work and TPC provided the “ inspiration”.
I was talking about the comments section in rattle pokemon’s video on youtube.
What does this do for your interest in the artist? In this case Sei Nanahara was known for some really nice arts in the tcg already. Does itnspoil the artist even if the other works are “clean”?
edit: i noticed that @lyleberr made this clear in the original post, sorry for the redundant comment
Well, it certainly calls into question if past art is clean at all. That is something I hadn’t considered.
I’ll admit, there may be something lost in translation here too. This is why I do attribute blame to pokemon themselves. But someonewhere someone decided to take fan art and make it part of the production process.
My issue with the statement is that theyve released how detailed and involved the pokemon art creation process is. How they are mostly detailed notes for theme, action, mood, setting, etc that the artist then draws, followed by several reviews for revisions and pokemon image adjustments. It seems difficult to take the apology at face value unless pokemon has changed their processes for digital based art in the past few years.
Things fall through the cracks and i appreciate pokemon immediately taking blame instead of the artist but i wonder how much of the apology is cultural norms. I would assume that if true they will quitely dismiss the artist and blacklist them, possibly their past work as well.
This whole thing seems like drama for the sake of drama frankly
Agreed. We’ll never know the details of what happened and it’s likely whoever is responsible will just get a warning. At least they are attempting to correct the situation.
It’s a good question. TPC has been really pushing new art and artist. Something I and many people love. The variety and expansive art has pushed a new level. Did the artist know they were basically copying another’s work? Hard to say. To me there is more evidence the TPC knew and didn’t care. Perhaps the artist trusted the source. It is unfortunate that if the artist did not know ,now they must rebuild trust. As an artist there is no worse a condemnation than stealing another’s work. Even if TPC sort of claims responsibility. The artist has been slapped the big scarlet letters “P” . So even in claiming responsibility, TPC will not suffer. The artist ( both, the original creator not acknowledged, and the employee following directions) will.
Knowing how detailed/strict they are it is a possibility that they wanted that exact pose image, but editied minially to fit in line more with Ho-oh specs and the main addition was Sie drawing the rest of the Bg and other Pokemon. Since the style does not match her usual work in or outside of Pokemon art
Or
It could also be a trace job/art theft by Sie covered in a seamless way by Creatures Inc.
Or
a lot of possibilities in between
I do belive you are right and that a good (but not foolproof) indicator of whether Sie is at fault could be Creatures no longer working with her.
If a Creatures employee is at fault they will likely be reprimanded or maybe fired, and Sie would (likely) continue to be commissioned
I personally do not think she is at fault.
The most annoying aspect about the whole thing, thanks to part social media culture and part internet anonymity, are the people just going to extremes about the issue and conflating it just to get some attention whteher through their keyboards or on video. So much toxicity.
It is nice to see some more thought out responses on here regardless of what people think of the issue
With the body of work SIE NANAHARA has in the TCG, it makes zero sense for her to intentionally trace someone else’s work to pass off as her own. I choose to believe the statement TPC put out. Knowing their process, it seems far more likely that (speculation) there was a time crunch and they had rejected her previous depiction and basically asked her to ‘copy’ this ‘official’ art which wasn’t official.
From the initial furore I thought she copied all the flying Pokemon as well, which turned out to be untrue.
I hope she isn’t blacklisted and hope that the clout chasers find something else to do instead of try to ruin someone’s life.
We don’t know exactlyyyyy what happened but I am glad at least they pulled the art and made an apology.
For me, pretty much all Gen AI images are slop to me and I cannot get behind the method that they achieve their look with “training material” and not compensating any artists for it.
Tracing I have a hardline stance on as well. Unless you are a) just starting out in art as a beginner and are trying to learn, b) tracing a piece from another artist, don’t post it without clearly crediting the original artist and making it clear what’s happening or c) just tracing a piece for fun on your own time, don’t post it or try to receive public favor for it. Just keep it private.
Usually the motive for tracing (and not crediting/mentioning) existing artworks is to make yourself seem better than you are at art and to receive praise/likes etc. In my experience traced artworks have also been submitted to art contests and they have no business being in there because they are not original works. One can only presume someone traced existing Pokemon works to win for some personal gain. Overall, tracing has no place in professional/competitive spaces, at the very least.
as for referencing art and using reference, I highly recommend it. Especially for learning from masters and people oh higher skill levels to really understand art fundamentals. Obviously this shouldn’t be referenced so hard that ur piece looks exactly like another’s artwork. There’s a grey area between reference and tracing that makes me suspicious (especially without credit/mention of the referenced piece). There’s the instances where someone can HEAVILY reference and just tweak a couple things just barely to try and it pass it off as their own. I tend to round it up to tracing. Cuz what are we even doing here.
Anyways, thats about it.
see ya.
My artist opinion is that the perspective and lines are too close to be coincidence. By FAR. But there may be other things going on… we don’t know what happens behind closed doors, but if we never see SIE NANAHARA’s work again, we’ll have a good idea.
As for the notion of tracing. I only succeed at visual art by tracing first. For this reason, I do not try to succeed at visual art. =) My Xileets avatar is heavily copied from the Rising Rivals Steelix.
I think that directly tracing is akin to copying another artist’s work, or using it to train an AI, or copying melody lines, or borrowing sentences and quotes without giving citation. If you add to the work, it’s fine, as long as you cite the original, but in illustration, I see no need for this unless it’s an homage, and since TPCI pulled this, that’s certainly not the case here.
addition:
Art is a process, not a product. Art is created through a filtering of the artist’s experiences, desires, intentions, and can even be a group project such as jazz music - converging from an anomalous “probability cloud”. Art work is the product which is created via this process.
Example of reference/homage (the artwork by arita, referencing the Nirvana cover) && Example of copying (the slight modification in shading, and choice for my arita youtube channel sliver, my favorite arita illus, nod to my childhood, and my hometown):
