Jake Parker/Alphonso Dunn Drama. An analysis.
I initially watched the first several minutes of the accusation video.
Are these books the same?
The most striking difference between the books is size.The Inktober book is 17x19cm, Alphonso Dunn book is A4 format - 21x29.7cm.
Okay, so there’s already a significant difference. How do you even copy someone’s book this way?
The other is amount of pages devoted to teaching:
Materials and tools start at page 46, The drawing instruction part ends at page 123. That's 77 pages, Alphonso Dunn book supplies start at page 10, instruction ends at page 164. That's 154 pages.
How is it a copy? 77 pages of a 17x19cm book are somehow a copy of 154 pages of a 21x29.7cm book?
Then what about the content?
Okay, maybe let’s start with the objections that Alphonso Dunn has. Basically, I watched first 30 minutes of his video before I had to stop because it quickly got so dumb that I just couldn’t continue to watch it.
Basically, he goes on and on about how much it took him to come up with various concepts, how many variations of line there are, etc. etc. how he was pondering upon it for months, but...
Here’s the thing. He taught it to other people for years.
When people are learning pen and ink drawing and are learning that there are 5 variations of strokes, 5 applications of strokes, 6 shades are needed for realistic drawing, etc. it becomes a part of their skillset.
It doesn’t matter how long it came up for him to come up with that stuff. Every artist uses stuff that came other people years to come up with. It’s all building up on work of other people. He’s using stroke types compiled long ago by other people, techniques that required ages to come up with but to him it’s completely normal, it’s only when other people learn something he thought on and pass it on, it’s plagiarism.
Like, it’s just so fucking dumb.
Basically he shows one page that has a suspiciously similar part and then he’s mostly grasping at straw and acting shocked and appalled that people have learned stuff he teaches and are now teaching it to others.
It begs a question is there even a point of learning pen and ink drawing from him? Lots of artists do tutorials as a part of promoting their work or as patreon rewards. Anyone who learned pen and ink drawing from his books may be rewarded for spending hundreds or thousands hours of grinding basic skills and then sharing that knowledge as a part of one’s artistic career with a video where Alphonso Dunn accuses them of plagiary and destroys their career because he worked months on thinking up these concepts, including the time he spend on realizing that he needs to show three sides of a cube.
