It has come to my attention that an individual has been tracing over other people's art/commissions, altering minor things such as colour scheme, and gifting it to other people who have requested him to draw. His ideal is noble, telling others that "Everyone deserves art, not just the ones with money." Okay I can understand that, but you're going about it the wrong way.

Firstly, what is being done can be considered plagiarism. Recreation of other's work in an academic sense can be considered a study, learning to draw more like a given style, and is honestly kind of flattering. I've had college classmates ask to borrow a drawing before to do exactly that. Afterwords they set their finished piece aside in their portfolio with a little note on the back explaining how it came to be drawn. This is fine, it was done with the intent of learning and in any given chance that it be used commercially (say to get a job in that case) there is credit given back to the original by the reinterpretation.
What this particular person is doing is quite the opposite. They are tracing, or making an artistic representation, without crediting the original, and claiming it as their own original artwork.

Secondly, doing anything for free is harmful to this community, and I don't mean gifts and being an active member*; That can be considered promotional in an attempt to get more customers and is actually lucrative. Creating art for free, on request, in this manner of tracing does two things. It devalues the original and the artists work, and it reduces the pool of customers that the artists need. Some people will be content with a decent tracing and be on there way, and will not pay to commission an artist because they will be on the lookout for freebies, since they already got one. There are some artists that live off commissions and by giving out free plagiarized art you are DIRECTLY hurting those people who are just trying to get by on the skin of their teeth! A perfect example would be someone like SilverDeni or Swizzlestix, who work their asses literally off just to get by!

Finally, what making a pose, a creature, a character, ect. is called is Intellectual Property Copyright. It is a legal term to describe the copyright you have to an idea. As soon as you put something down in writing, or any other artistic media, you own the idea of that work. It is the most abused and fragile piece of law there is, because so many get away with stealing other's ideas; This is because it is so hard to trace back when an idea was first conceived and actually employed. It's also impossible to not break this copyright, because everything we have done or thought may or may not have been already thought of somewhere out there in the universe. So all it really comes down to is moral ambiguity. You know if you are stealing an idea or not. I've had many times where I thought up something cool and some one else had the same idea, and at the end of the day we were able to link out ideas back to separate references and experiences we had in life, making them essentially NOT the same idea.

I feel like I'm rambling now, but I also think I made my point. I'm going to rest on this subject for now because this was a good way to vent.

*What I meant by "active member" is doing promotional streams where free art prizes and raffles are held and creating art solely for your own amusement and/or promotional means.