~snip
As you can see on the mouth part there are two mouth lines. There are no work-in progress images, so it made me think that way.
I'm curious if this was discussed before, but when I have no time to create actual art independently, I outsource and pay someone to create the digital art for me. So for this one, I did outsource it, so I asked him, and he said that it wasn't AI. I hope this doesn't disqualify me from joining this contest, and I will also show work-in-progress images.
Well this is a contest, not a business, where you buy stuff, sell it to other and gain profit. We perhaps have seen some users uploaded artworks that was not created by themselves, but they told us about that. If you have no time to create, you can just leave it and join the next one. Perhaps what you did isn't technically wrong, since there is no specific rule about that. But that's an unethical thing to do. Imagine you have a test to get a job, and your competitor paid someone smarter than him to do the test. I think that's unfair. Beside that, what you did might encourage other people to do the same, by just simply paying some professional artist to create the artwork. I think it doesn't disqualify you from the contest, and I know your are a regular participant. But it might change the perception of judges when judging your artwork. I wish there is no such case again in future.
Actually, I got some reports that there might be some alt accounts in this art contest, but I ignore it since there is no solid proof. So hopefully the accusation is wrong. Let's make this contest great and fun again. You don't need to be a great artist to join, just create it from your own imagination, express it, and give a proper theme. The first submission by JanEmil is cool! Good luck guys!