Jaguar Force Art Fraud Case - My Side of the Story

Hello everyone. First of all sorry for the long post, but I couldn't make it shorter. Let's start. I'm writing this post because at least two people have made a mistake. The first one is me. I made a few repaints of the free stock photos from pexels

Second one is the person who published posts about me under @jaguar.force. @jaguar.force claims that my work isn't digital painting, but AI tool used to generate images that look like art. He has found the source of the repaints or the photos that are taken from the source.

The posts I'm refering to are the following:

I have commented on those posts in order to solve this problem. I have received feedback from @midlet - admin of the OnChainArt community. He brought valid arguments that back the claim that my works are done by AI. The comment can be viewed here
. I also tried contacting @jaguar.force on discord, but no search results were displayed so I'm writing this on chain.
This post is my explanation why it isn't done by AI, and an explanation how I made such digital paintings. So let's start with an original photo:

According to the @jaguar.force the source of the original photo is: serenevistas however I have downloaded it from pexels under the license that allows commercial and non-commercial use and editing without the attribution to the photographer. But this is a minor thing and it's the same photo so there won't be many words about it later. Let me begin the explanation of how I made a digital painting.

What every artist does at the beginning is to lay down basic shapes of the subject that he is drawing. This is what I did too. Keep in mind that these aren't volumetric shapes, instead they are shapes operating in 2 point perspective. The goal was to get the position and proportion of houses correctly.

The next thing I've done are some additional windows that I decided are of importance for the whole composition. I forgot to say that I am completely self taught. This fact will explain some techniques others might consider odd or obsolete. I'm learning digital and traditional since 2018. But I made a few paintings on paper before.

Next part I did is that I traced the tree outline of the tree and its branches. I did this to save time. I could do it by angle transferring, but it would take me much time and makes little sense doing it digitally.

After making the skeleton of a tree, I added an rough outline of treetop and I also added an edge of the tree to the left.

When it all combines together it looks like this. Note that the image is flipped horizontally. This is because I flip it a number of times while working so that I can spot mistakes more easily.

After having the skeleton done I used my free hand to draw rough outline of the houses. I did this because I'm not a fan of tracing and I try to develop my skill that I completely stop relying on it. I am pretty confident when doing it traditionally, but when doing digital it's much harder to draw a straight line.

I did the same for the tree base. I turned on stroke recording while I did this for the next step. Also I forgot to say that I'm drawing the used out tablet with malfunctioning pressure sensitivity so I turned it off.

Stroke recording helped me do this. Although it took me a lot of time i did color those recorded strokes instead of leaving them black. Every few strokes I applied a certain color and so on.

These two images are what I referenced to get the color. The left one shows distribution of values across the photo. Right one helped me reference color saturation and hue. I got these two images by using photoshop option: filter -> filter gallery -> cutout. This is a double edged sword however. Although it shows values with high precision, it can make huge mistakes when doing the same in color (like the upper right corner). I found out of this on youtube in an art fundamentals tutorial.

Finally the time has come for the coloring and shading. I used a bit smaller brush then for the outline, I reduced flow also. I want to mention that at this point I started using custom brushe with multiple "bristles". This photo shows painting a part of a house.

On this image you see the painting of the left house nearly done. One note here - while working on the painting I have merged some layers so I had to re-create steps, this resulted in a slightly different strokes.

Going on that way I did the full painting of houses, tree and some grass near them.

On the left you see the last steps. I increased the size of the brush while reducing flow to cover larger area making it a little more blurry and abstract, but not too much.

And the last step after painting everything was to fix some mistakes I made.

I hope I have delivered necessary and sufficient proof that this is not the product of AI, deep learning, neural network or however you can name it.

Also in the post where I'm mentioned as a fraud I saw the term "plagiarized". Just to make everything clear plagiarism is: "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own."

This is a definition that popped out on google when I searched. Here we aren't talking about that as it can be clearly seen above. This is a derivative work. And yes it is considered copyright infringement if done without permission. This is why I used free images from pexels. The reason why I'm doing repaints of photos is not that I want to steal anything. The fact is that I'm not that skilled to be able to draw from imagination. This is why I'm using a combination of observation and measuring.

And yes it was my mistake not to put sources of the original, I'm very sorry for that. I never meant to hide anything, this is why I didn't stop myself from repainting a free picture that has been viewed around 2.5 million times. That would be silly to even try plagiarizing.

I just wanted to mention @midlet and @jaguar.force for doing amazing work as exposing frauds and plagiarizers is essential part of keeping the community alive. Also I would kindly ask them to resteem this (if it was of enough proof) so the people who saw previous posts in order to minimize the damage done not only to me, but to the curie, a respectable curator organization which has been upvoting some of my posts, and whose some creators are my personal friends who did so much good to this community both on steem and hive. All the rewards from this post will be burned.

I will also mention some of the voters of the posts I put the links in the beginning and ask them to reconsider their votes. Please excuse my brevity as my goal is not to spam users, but inform them about my side of the story.
@upmewhale @cryptoandcoffee @smartvote @steemaction @forykw @raiseup @votebetting @bitcoingodperson @isnochys @spt-skillup @memehub @broncnutz @jphamer1 @slider2990

Now if you have read all of this I wish to thank you. I also wish you all the best.