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Description
still not a good substitute for truth

EDIT: He's back. [link]

Backstory: I came across this guy's gallery late one night when I saw the Sorrow the Hedgehog picture come up in the Sonic fanart stream that I subscribe to. I recognized the character and wondered why people were still doing fanart of a character that doesn't really have that much of a following anymore, so when I checked out the picture, I saw no links or credit to the person who created the Sorrow character. That threw up the first red flag.

I checked the rest of the person's gallery and found what you see there in the screenshot, anime artwork all using different styles, tools, and techniques. (For the novice stolen-art hunter, you should know... whenever a person has around 2-3 different styles showing up in their gallery, and it isn't over the space of several years of work, the gallery owner is most likely an art thief.) PLUS, I recognized the dragon artwork as being that of Ruth Thompson, whose work I have used to decorate my subject binders back in college, so that I was able to recognize her art and style anywhere (another note to novices: expose yourself to as much artwork as you can!)

I began doing research using Google and TinEye to find links to the original works, and replied to comments posted by people praising Scourge for his "work", letting the person know that the piece was stolen and where the image could be found elsewhere online. After a while I guess Scourge finally found me because he started posting stuff like [link] on my page.

At this point, his story was that not only was all that work his, but the artists everyone claimed he had stolen from had actually stolen HIS art and was posting it on other sites without his permission.

After a round of jumping on the pages of anyone who replied to him and telling them more junk about all that artwork being his, he posted a journal demanding that everyone believe him. No one did, so he deleted the journal and uploaded another piece he got off Google, claiming it to be another character from his series, like nothing happened. After a while, I think DA responded to a report and took one of his pieces down.

By this time, it was already aware to him that people knew where he had downloaded the dragon artwork, so he changed his story to where "everything but the dragon is my own work". This story changed several times as more people posted links to other sites proving that the work he was posting was actually the property of another artist, each time adding on like "OK, everything but the dragon and the Sonic picture is mine" and so on.

Since the "Gaia" picture was a fairly recent original work that did not feature a popular character and was not yet dispersed all over the Internet, it was harder to find the original of compared to all of the other pictures, and realizing this, Scourge vehemently claimed that the work was his. This continued up until someone found the gallery of "Slipknot" on DA (notice the small white signature in the corner of the picture) and found the original there. As for "Blade", a work that was nearly stripped of all its identity over the years it had been spread over the Internet, it took the Wayback Machine to locate the original artist, a Capcom illustrator named Bubblegumlion, whose watermark still remained on the picture.

He eventually reverted back to his original story of all of it being his, this time claiming that he was unaware that those pictures already existed elsewhere when he drew them, as though it were just pure coincidence that his works matched the other works perfectly. Then, I suppose at that point DA was able to review all of the reports sent to them, and they deleted his account.

Description
still not a good substitute for truth

EDIT: He's back. [link]

Backstory: I came across this guy's gallery late one night when I saw the Sorrow the Hedgehog picture come up in the Sonic fanart stream that I subscribe to. I recognized the character and wondered why people were still doing fanart of a character that doesn't really have that much of a following anymore, so when I checked out the picture, I saw no links or credit to the person who created the Sorrow character. That threw up the first red flag.

I checked the rest of the person's gallery and found what you see there in the screenshot, anime artwork all using different styles, tools, and techniques. (For the novice stolen-art hunter, you should know... whenever a person has around 2-3 different styles showing up in their gallery, and it isn't over the space of several years of work, the gallery owner is most likely an art thief.) PLUS, I recognized the dragon artwork as being that of Ruth Thompson, whose work I have used to decorate my subject binders back in college, so that I was able to recognize her art and style anywhere (another note to novices: expose yourself to as much artwork as you can!)

I began doing research using Google and TinEye to find links to the original works, and replied to comments posted by people praising Scourge for his "work", letting the person know that the piece was stolen and where the image could be found elsewhere online. After a while I guess Scourge finally found me because he started posting stuff like [link] on my page.

At this point, his story was that not only was all that work his, but the artists everyone claimed he had stolen from had actually stolen HIS art and was posting it on other sites without his permission.

After a round of jumping on the pages of anyone who replied to him and telling them more junk about all that artwork being his, he posted a journal demanding that everyone believe him. No one did, so he deleted the journal and uploaded another piece he got off Google, claiming it to be another character from his series, like nothing happened. After a while, I think DA responded to a report and took one of his pieces down.

By this time, it was already aware to him that people knew where he had downloaded the dragon artwork, so he changed his story to where "everything but the dragon is my own work". This story changed several times as more people posted links to other sites proving that the work he was posting was actually the property of another artist, each time adding on like "OK, everything but the dragon and the Sonic picture is mine" and so on.

Since the "Gaia" picture was a fairly recent original work that did not feature a popular character and was not yet dispersed all over the Internet, it was harder to find the original of compared to all of the other pictures, and realizing this, Scourge vehemently claimed that the work was his. This continued up until someone found the gallery of "Slipknot" on DA (notice the small white signature in the corner of the picture) and found the original there. As for "Blade", a work that was nearly stripped of all its identity over the years it had been spread over the Internet, it took the Wayback Machine to locate the original artist, a Capcom illustrator named Bubblegumlion, whose watermark still remained on the picture.

He eventually reverted back to his original story of all of it being his, this time claiming that he was unaware that those pictures already existed elsewhere when he drew them, as though it were just pure coincidence that his works matched the other works perfectly. Then, I suppose at that point DA was able to review all of the reports sent to them, and they deleted his account.