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):
