rainwaltz:

dollception:

stripedpants:

I’ve recently found out that an Artist I liked (and was actually planning on buying from) traces.

You’ve probably seen his traced works floating around here and there, all of cute headshots of girls, but if you haven’t seen his work he owns this storenvy where you can see his stuff.

But everything if not all of the things he’s selling is traced.

Some examples:

He takes images from from a company called BlueFairy, which to my understanding is a ball joint doll company.

The company itself have stated that they’ve contacted Kaoru Hasegawa about this problem but that didn’t stop him from continually selling more traced photos.

The thing is he doesn’t even flip the image or change the color to be something less obvious, it’s straight up traced and he’s making so much money from being uncreative and original.

More proof of tracing

Please spread the word and encourage people to stop buying his traced prints!!

reblogging again because i decided to post the extra tracing shots on my instagram earlier today, and hasegawa ended up direct messaging me to request i take down the images of his artwork and linked me to this page: http://kaoruhasegawa.com/info

…which basically talks about how he totally didn’t trace/heavily copy any doll photographs to make his artwork and how the internet is ganging up on him for no reason.

it’s basically the “deny deny DENY & i’m really the victim here because the internet is full of dumb people” strategy that tends to work pretty well, especially on diehard and/or clueless fans (or fans that just don’t give a shit about art theft). i even found myself wondering, “am i jumping to conclusions???”

but shit dude, there are 12 images that match up perfectly to bluefairy’s company photos. even the hair and some of the clothes are exactly the same (there’s maybe one or 2 from the examples linked to in the original post that differ slightly, and that’s just for added volume or bangs).
i’m willing to give the benefit of a doubt now and then, but there are a few too many similarities for me to ignore, and there seems pretty good reason for bluefairy to not have backed down when he and them were apparently communicating through lawyers.

hi!! the doll in the first photo is mine, and bluefairy contacted me october of last year regarding this issue.

afaik they are/were trying to get a public apology from kaoru hasegawa to no avail, and they haven’t managed to shut his storeenvy down either. bluefairy didn’t raise this issue as much as they could’ve because he countersued them for libel, so they’ve kept quiet about it since their first announcement while discussions are ongoing.

his site says that he considers it ‘resolved’ (oct 15, 2015) but the last message bluefairy sent me (oct 19, 2015) said they were going to keep pursuing the matter. i haven’t had any updates since then, so i’m not sure what’s going on now

tl;dr please do not buy from kaoru hasegawa

This made me really sad when I found out about it because I used to actually follow Kaoru Hasegawa on here.

If it was one or two then I could see how it might be coincidence, but with the number of pictures that line up so perfectly with Blue Fairy photos is pretty much impossible to deny.