Where did these artworks come from?

A while back I was on Tumblr and saw a post about how the site was getting riddled with AI generated images that were being passed off as legit and people not even questioning it and the larger issue of people not caring about where the artworks and cool images they reblog come from, ironically Tumblr is one of the websites that links to sources the most, likely due to its blogging nature as opposed to the limited character count of like Twitter and such. So you know it's bad when the big crediting website still has a problem with a lack of crediting.

A while later I encountered the exact issue the post was talking about, there was an artwork-with-funny-caption meme and I got curious because the artwork seemed a little strange and it made that previous post ring in my head, my eyebrow was raised.

I went on a little Google Lens quest. Google Lens is one of the best reverse search tools... When it comes to actually searching the image on the internet, not in its AI summary which attempted to attribute the wizard to several different artists, who may not even be real people to begin with, hallucinated.

In fact, all I could find via reverse search were reposts of the exact same meme and I had to dig deeper and deeper only to find out that yes, it was indeed AI generated, I then returned to read the replies on Tumblr and apparently a good number of people had sussed it out, no idea how they individually did it but they knew. It was still a minority regardless, the post had over 30k notes and only a couple replies pointing out the artwork had no human origin.

SO EVENTUALLY I was on Bsky and found this meme:

This wizard nor the image above it seemed particularly generated and in fact I felt I had seen both before. I was most interested in the wizard though, both due to the Tumblr wizard and the fact that I simply like wizards. For the sake of completion the artwork above is by Mark Fredrickson, he's a famous artist and it was super easy to track... But the wizard?

I had to keep digging and digging, all I was getting was shit like Pinterest and other famous repost websites, the closest thing I got to a source was this one website that was seemingly like ArtStation, which industry professionals tend to use and is full of crazy detailed artworks like this.

But there was a problem with the image in this website.

Do you see it?

(It's a complete remake of the pic.)

The details immediately jumped to me, for starters the rendering is completely different, I think the first thing that caught my attention was the lighting from the candle, then there was the writing on the paper, then I realized the hands and feather looked different and blah blah blah, from the candle and writing I already realized it wasn't the same picture.

So that's what we're dealing with here, one of those images that are so old and so reposted all over the internet and so remixed that practically noone knows of its origin, at least comparatively next to the people who actually know where it's from. Realizing it was a remake I discarded it. The search continues.

The next best thing I got was one of the Pinterest reposts with a DeviantArt link, the picture had a website watermark so I figured it was a repost of a repost, possibly a repost of a repost of a repost (Tellest -> DeviantArt -> Pinterest).

In this case I at least have the full original(?) image in a good size, but that wasn't necessarily leading me to the source, by this point I had seen this image several times, I wasn't just trying to see the full image, I wanted the source, so if this wasn't the source I would still have to do a lot of digging.

The Pinterest post led to this DeviantArt post, now linking to DeviantArt still doesn't mean it's the source, but as I've come to learn it usually is, the problem is that there's still a lot of reposts on DeviantArt but without any other cues I had to give this one a look.

The caption reads:

"Cover for Tellest short story. I assume wizard seems Gandalf but should be a generic wizard!
good weekend anyone"

• Sidequest unlocked: Figure out if it's Gandalf.

So now clearly I have to search this Tellest thing, what even is this Tellest thing that's not only in the watermark but this person also mentions? What are the short stories also?

"Tellest is a fictional fantasy universe that sprung to life in 2011 (some legends say that it was forming for about a decade before that, but these claims cannot be substantiated). It was the brainchild of Michael DeAngelo, who treated the stories as labors of love. These were tales that wanted to be told, and DeAngelo was happy to oblige."

This is the description the Tellest website gives and from this, and a quick look around the site, the whole thing becomes that much clearer, and while digging through the site I find this..!

This is it, this is the original image, straight from the source. In the worst quality I've seen so far!

But there's some info I get from this image's filename, the title of the piece, which I had not seen until now is Wizard at Study, this is obviously a resized version, from the formatting I guess it's resized with WordPress and... That's about it, if I want any more info on this image and its source I have to reach out to Mr Michael Tellest himself.

Instinctively I go to their social media, Twitter DMs are closed, Facebook's are open but the big "Contact Us" button seems more appropriate. I sent in my mail and waited... And waited.

At some point I decide to reach out via leaving a comment on his YouTube channel, which is active and he's likely to see it. And he saw it! I filled the contact form again and he received it, maybe the previous one got buried or didn't go through or whatever. But I finally was in contact with the person who would know best about this pic.

I was still unsure who the artist was so I asked him if he was the artist or otherwise who was the artist and where could I find them?

He said if he drew it himself he'd be a lot more sticky [Like a stick figure], the character is an original one, not Gandalf.

• Sidequest completed!

He commissioned it from the artist Leonardo Borazio, username DLeoBlack over ten years ago and- Hold on.

"dleoblack" IS the username on DeviantArt, he was posting the commission that he made, in fact looking at the remake that someone else made the description read: "This art work is ©?dleoblack i have made this art work in my own again ." This made me investigate these artists a little more, the remake artist Amit Kumar had an ArtStation page so I dug through that instead of this odd site that the pic was hosted in. ArtStation art thieves are nothing new so I had to check and reverse search his artworks, none of them had credits like the DLeoBlack piece did, but also none of them showed up anywhere else when reverse searching them, so it's possible those are all original? Or the remaking led to them being unrecognizable compared to the originals, but I have no reason to believe these are stolen, not specially when he credited the wizard piece.

On the other hand Leo's DeviantArt which stopped being active in 2022 was full of crazy artworks, the wizard piece was already fire and he clearly got even better over the years. He's only posting on... Yep, ArtStation, like the gosh darned professional he is. Michael sent me the link to his page and it's full of even crazier pieces and he's worked on capital M Massive productions including How to Train your Dragon, Paths of Exile, and Magic: the Gathering where he did art for a Lord of the Rings set... Hold on. HOLD ON.

NOW he did paint Gandalf, the real Gandalf, for an official Gandalf media. FUNNY HOW THINGS COME AROUND. Not only he did this image, but he also did the art for the "You Cannot Pass!" card as Michael informed me, LOOK AT THIS:

Crazy stuff.

So who is the other wizard, the one who is not Gandalf? That's Gaston Camlann, their scribe from the world of Tellest. "At the time, I was putting together a lot of short stories, and needed an image that could represent them without me having to get new cover art each time" said Michael. Take a good look at the man:

These are three artworks featuring Gaston that Michael shared with me, I assume there are more but I'm fine with these for now, specially that first one, it's a crazy good illustration, he looks so good, his design is great, and we get a good look at his whole design.

Leo is still a regular artist for Tellest, there's currently an upcoming book where he's set to draw the cover for as well but with a different character. But about the original Wizard at Study pic...

THERE IT IS, IN ALL ITS GLORY.

The full thing, in full size, uncropped, not edited, here it is, finally. Apart from its aforementioned purpose this image also ended up being used for the cover for 100 Fantasy Writing Prompts, one of Michael's books. But that's not the only book it's been the cover of... Michael mentioned that this is in fact one of his [of Tellest property, the artist is Leo lol] most stolen and reposted artworks, many people tried to use it as the cover for their own books and they had to be reached out to so they'd go with something original. Additionally this image is also for sale as a poster at Tellest's Etsy shop.

When sharing the original image Michael pointed out Leonardo's signed the artwork on the napkin at the bottom, ironically this signature was obscured by the "@TELLEST.COM" watermark he put on the DeviantArt upload.

So that's where this wizard arc has led us but, even though I've always been inclined to reverse search artworks I like, this whole journey has made me more curious, the other day I saw a Touhou meme and... Well, look at it.

Well it's less a meme and more what in the industry we call "interaction bait" (Text says "A mage turns you into your favorite Touhou character," you're supposed to comment which one it is). So, seeing that it's a cool wizard artwork I had to go on a journ- Wizard's Final Judgement! by Louis Monnich, this one was easy.

It's got prints for sale here and you can also buy the original artwork, I could not find any copycats or anything, it all led here.

So what else do the memes have for us? I remembered one of the funniest pics I've seen in recent years...

And found the source:

I remembered another one of the most popular art memes in recent times, and I found the source:

The author added some commentary after it became a meme:
"*2025 For those who still have doubts, this was to be a vent art, at this time in 2016 I was going through a lot of difficulties and problems with my family, but today I'm much better and I've overcome those problems. So I don't mind if the art is used for memes, I even like how it changed from something sad to something funny for me xD."
Is that not amazing to see? Maybe not for most, but as someone who's both an internet archeologist and someone who cares about crediting art, it is pretty interesting to me at least.

And here's the final boss of this whole ordeal...

WHO DID THIS?

Another industry professional it is.

After spending hours digging through a Danbooru archive, slowly examining several archives on the Wayback Machine to keep track of username changes, comparing artworks, checking DeviantArt pages, examining each post on a Pixiv account, I finally figured out who the artist for this was. Internet archeology is no joke.

It turns out that this is a pretty popular artist in the current day. But their artstyle has shifted almost entirely, or at least the subjects of their art have. Nowadays they're known better from their animation work, where they've done stuff with Capcom for Mega Man stuff just to name one example.

The closest to their classic anime girl artworks in recent times that I found was a Gawr Gura piece which was a little funny because the original girl with glasses piece was (as the description reads) made for VeBonBon. VeBonBon currently going mostly by veenn__ is famous for drawing VTubers. So it's funny to see that their interests still match, extra points because they're both Nimi Nightmare fans.

The Gura artwork in question.

Initially, a while back, I thought of giving up the search after finding the Pixiv upload and reading VeBonBon's name then finding their current veenn__ account, at least I found who the art was made for and maybe I could reach out to ask at some point who the artist was (i.e. I was never gonna ask them). And it was the right move not to ask, now that I found the artist I found out veenn isn't following them, and between all the username changes I can figure they had lost contact at some point.

But I found them, this artist is guz, 0_guzzu on Twitter, guzzu on YouTube, guzzu.0 on Instagram. They've done work for Valorant, Boruto and they even used to draw stick figures fighting! At least they used to be on Hyun's Dojo and StickPage, but I couldn't quite find what their work there was.

It really catches you by surprise who's behind those artworks you've seen all the time online, this is one of the most reposted anime girl images ever and while finding the source was easy (Use any random repost -> Put it on SauceNAO -> Original Pixiv post is still up) finding out who the artist was, which had been inactive on Pixiv for over a decade was NOT.

So yeah, learning who's behind the artworks you love can be a beautiful thing, I encourage everyone who's ever been curious about an artwork to try it.