Home News UPDATE: Sega Uses Plagiarized Evan Stanley Work for Inaugural "Fan Art Friday"

UPDATE: Sega Uses Plagiarized Evan Stanley Work for Inaugural "Fan Art Friday"

Tristan Oliver
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The fact we have a long running Fan Fridays segment notwithstanding, Sega tried to throw their hat into the community engagement arena when they introduced Fan Art Fridays to the world last week.  This week, it debuted on Twitter with a spectacular failure.


The photo you see above was not actually drawn by Francine Rosales as cited, but actually by Evan Stanley, who was once an unofficial fanartist, but has since worked her way to an official capacity at Archie Comics, contributing to the Sonic comics from time to time.
A series of apologetic Tweets infers that those inside Sega used little to no screening process to verify the work, and appeared to take the art thief at her word:


At least it’s not as bad as when fan art made it into the original Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and Sonic and the Black Knight.

UPDATE: Sega’s Kellie Parker has issued a formal statement on the matter on the Sega blog:

Recently, we decided to start featuring some of the great Sonic fan art out there. We announced Fan Art Friday earlier this week, and we’ve seen hundreds of art submissions already. A lot of them have been truly amazing, and I can’t wait to show them to you in the weeks and months to come. One of the things we specified in that original announcement and call for artwork is that the pieces should be your own original work. Unfortunately, right out of the gate, that wasn’t what happened.

To be totally honest, we were concerned about doing Fan Art Friday, and this is why. There’s some amazing artwork out there, but how could we ever know for sure that the artwork someone submitted was their own original art? Trying to find the original source for something on the internet is kind of like having a bowl full of different ice cream flavors and trying to pick out just one of them. You can just never know for sure.

But ultimately, the benefits outweighed the risks. We have a long history of posting Sonic fan art, from way back in the Sonic Central days. There’s great Sonic fan art out there. We want to recognize the dedicated Sonic fans who make this. We thought about just posting artwork, without going through the risk of putting a name to it. But that wouldn’t be giving credit to the fans we’re trying to honor with this. Nope, the best way to do this was to be specific that people needed to submit their own original works of art. And then just hope that people were honest enough to do that, and not try to get attention for work they didn’t do.

The first piece of artwork we featured today was submitted by someone named Francine Rosales, via our Facebook page. It was one of the first submissions we received, and it’s really great artwork. I had personally not seen it before, and Francine’s name was in the bottom right corner of the artwork. I selected it to lead off Fan Art Fridays.

Unfortunately, this was not Francine’s original work. Many fans alerted us to the fact that this was Evan Stanley’s artwork. We quickly updated the text on Facebook, and issued a correction tweet with a link to Evan’s artwork. We also replied to everyone who took the time to alert us of the issue. This doesn’t undo the damage that was done, though.

There’s a lot of Sonic fan art out there. We’ve seen a lot of it, but we can’t be expected to see it all. Let alone to know the original artist for all of it. It’s very difficult to find the original source of something on the internet. With the hundreds of submissions that we receive, and the time it takes to look at, evaluate, organize, upload, and schedule them all, we couldn’t do Fan Art Friday if we had to individually research each piece of art that was submitted. So we clearly stated that all submitted art should be your own original work, and left it at that.
In this case, Francine intentionally tried to pass off someone else’s artwork as her own. Right down to changing the signature in the bottom right corner to reflect her own name. We didn’t know this, or we never would have posted it. We’ll do our best to better evaluate the artwork in the future, but sometimes mistakes happen. We’ll always apologize and credit the original artist when they do. If you see that we’ve posted artwork by someone other than the person named, please let us know.

TL;DR – Please only submit your own original artwork for Fan Art Fridays. Passing someone else’s artwork off as your own hurts us all.

If you have submitted artwork for Fan Art Fridays that wasn’t your own original work, please let us know. You can send an email to communityteam@sega.com (with Fan Art Friday in the subject line), you can send us a message on our Facebook page, or you can send us a tweet. We won’t chastise you, and we won’t tell anyone. We’ll simply remove your submission from the queue.

We really, honestly, want to celebrate the fan art and fan artists in the Sonic community. Thanks for helping us do that.

This story was originally written by the author for TSSZ News

Tags Evan StanleyFan ArtSEGASEGA AmericaSonic The Hedgehog (Series)TSSZ News
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Tristan Oliver

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52 Comments

  1. Sega, please stop making exclusive games for Wii U! That’s why people are stealing your fan art!

    1. I… erm… hang on, I need to upgrade my English parsing module. The version I have installed crashes every time I read that post.

    4. Ooh, I want to play, too!
      “SEGA, please stop making exclusive games for Wii U! That’s why the ice caps are melting!”
      “SEGA, please stop making exclusive games for Wii U! That’s why there is unrest in the Middle East!”
      “SEGA, please stop making exclusive games for Wii U! That’s why I got dropped on my head as a baby!”
      Am I doing this right?

      1. @LBD “Nyttrayn”, I think I laughed harder than I should’ve reading your comment

      2. We could do Sigma Memes!
        It’s raining today./Blame the Wii-U.
        Nintendo is publishing Bayonetta when others wouldn’t touch it?/Use their money to release it on other platforms.
        PSO2 isn’t coming out in the west./It’s the Wii-U’s fault.
        Game comes out for the Wii-U?/Better microwave the baby,

    6. Wait, what? How did you get from fanart theift to bitching about the Wii-U?
      Do you need a time out? Because you’re seriously getting out of hand with your Wii-U-Phobia.

    8. Rrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht……

    9. “Stop making exclusive Wii U games! This is why the pingas is snooping as usual! This is why we’re up and down and all around! This is why we bring chilidogs directly to you, the viewer! Um…on second thought I’m hungry so keep making those games.”
      Seriously though, it’s Nintendo exclusive, not Wii U exclusive. That includes 3DS as well. And, again, there’s only one game left in this deal. It’s not permanent.

    11. Sega, please stop making exclusive games for Wii U! That’s why Sigma is being a dumbass!

  4. we couldn’t do Fan Art Friday if we had to individually research each piece of art that was submitted

    Then don’t do it. Simples.

      1. ^ This ^ I don’t get how making mistakes (something inherent) makes them fucking stupid. While I do agree that Sega are kind of stupid and does stupid things sometimes but this is nowhere as bad as when they decided to create the catastrophe that is Sonic Boom or release ’06 at the state that it was at just to milk the franchise.

        3. Real cute Hero.
          Boom has already made catastrophic mistakes in the eyes of some. Even if the game turns out INCREDIBLE, those mistakes will not be undone.

        4. Attack of the Killer Sports Tape – coming to a backstreet cinema near you!

        5. Or are you talking about Knuckles, the living Macy’s Day parade balloon?

        6. Oh yeah, because like this thread shows, something should only be judged by the few mistakes that it has already made and because of those few mistakes the game will never be incredible….even if it is incredible. It’s nice that I can finally make sense of your logic now. 🙂

        7. If they created a Shadow the Hedgehog 2 and gave Sonic and Co bazookas and hand grenades, even if the game itself turned out to be fun, it would still have done damage to the brand and can be considered a mistake for the franchise.
          I don’t like the direction Boom is going. I think it’s wrong for the series. Therefore, to some of us, it represents is a catastrophic departure from the Sonic we know and love, regardless of the overall quality of the gameplay mechanics.

  6. Then you should have a voting system, allow fans to vote on the featured art piece for the week, that way the artists and fans of the artists (such as myself) can catch the dishonest in the act; as one who has watched Evan for roughly…four years? Five? I’m easily able to reconize her style with little to no effort, and she never signs any other name to her work, ie: she has no other moniker, she’s always been just EvanStanley. 🙂
    That, or get a few people who know artist styles well enough to catch the popular pieces getting submitted, and or do the required research to make sure the submitter is honest. I’m sorry to say, but just because you ask them to only submit their work doesn’t mean they will, that’s the internet for you.
    That being said, kudos to everyone who alerted Sega to the problem.

  7. Will everybody please stop teasing the Wii U’s current condition?! Do you know how long it took for the DS, Wii and 3DS to shine with popularity?!

    1. Wasn’t the Wii the fastest selling console in history when it was released? And didn’t the DS beat the PSP so thoroughly the Vita inherited the bruises? 🙂

    2. As well as RaceProUK’s point – although, yes, the 3DS took a little while to get itself going (and is still one of the main reasons I still have hope the WiiU could potentially gain momentum given the right circumstances), really – for the most part – its only Sigma.

  8. So does it have to be fan art of official characters or can original character be submitted too?

    1. I asked. No fan made characters or game ideas. I initially wanted to submit one of my fan logos but no dice

    2. Why would anyone want to see fan characters on the official Sonic blog in the first place? That’s not what they go there for.

      1. It’s a legitimate question that’s worth asking. Better to ask and know before hand than submit it anyway and be told you can’t do that.

        1. My question is why someone would think to submit that kind of content in the first place.

        2. ….why not? A fan community is about sharing, and to me, there’s no point in making something unless you’re willing to share it. It’s kind of a fun thing to share stuff like that actually. And plus, it’s going to be the first question people ask, because it’s called “Fan Art Fridays”, not “Sonic Fan Art Depicting Sonic Only Fan Art Fridays”. There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Fan art is fan art. Nobody would be a n00b for submitting an OC before being told that they can’t do that, it’s an honest mistake, just like how this situation was.

        4. Well excuse me if not everyone calculates every detail before they put themselves out there like you do. Yeesh. :/

  9. That apology letter reminded me of Sonic Central.
    Freaking why would you remind me it existed now I want it back.

  12. I wonder if the drawing can only have Sonic characters in it… I drew a crossover picture, and it’s like, the only good-ish thing I’ve ever drawn. Then again, Sonic isn’t the main character in it, so…
    I suppose I could try and submit my avatar.

    1. From the sound of things, they’re looking for purely Sonic characters, though I’m sure their page covers much more details. So far what I’m getting is that they would prefer to have artwork of official cast and not original characters.

        1. Hmmmm, yeah, they probably wouldn’t except that, especially since Sonic is almost butted out of the shot, most of the characters are from different franchises, and your character is there. At the very least, it’s a good excuse to starting doing more Sonic art again! 😀

        2. Yeah, I haven’t drawn anything in ages. I’m supposed to start a Zelda marathon on Miiverse (I’ve already done Sonic and Mario), too.
          Do you have a Miiverse/Nintendo Network ID?

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