My issues with rossdraws
Disclaimer: The opinions and views I speak about in this google docs are based on my own experiences with the party involved.

My name is Fen,

I’m someone who used to be very active in his community and that he eventually had me on to help with conventions, teach him clip studio paint, and to ask for my feedback on prints, his projects, and what’s popular in anime circles.

I’ve only done two conventions for ross. The first one was lightbox 2023, where some of these issues were present but they weren’t as egregious.

A lot of these issues became obvious at AX 2024.
Ross cares very much about appearances to the point it consumes him and has a very inflated self image about himself.

In my opinion, Ross doesn’t see people, as people, but as tools, assets and props for his vision. He doesn’t really have any regard for what other people go through and will make a bunch of false promises as long as he gets what he wants.

Ross doesn’t like to pay people. He will do his best to get volunteers but if you bring up payment, he’s very quick to take it away. And when you’re someone who isn’t afforded many opportunities like this and you’d want to do anything you can to preserve it. And I did agree to volunteer for this, I had only brought it up because I found out other people have been paid, were getting paid, or had their flights reimbursed. After my experience with ross, I think he knows that people want to get close to him and will take advantage of that.

Here, Ross specifically asked me to work for him at AX 2024 and like I mentioned before, when it comes to payment, he’ll threaten to take the opportunity away. Yes he housed me but he also housed my coworker for this convention and he paid him.

To add further support to what I’m saying. Ross had also asked me to stay for San Diego Comic Con after AX, both in the same month. At this point, I’m not being paid and I work two job and I do overtime, just to make sure I can afford this trip and make sure my bills are covered for the time I’m gone. Here, he wanted me to stay the whole month, unpaid but masked it as a month’s vacation. My bills don’t take a vacation with me. And before people comment on my rent and utilities, I have roommates and this is just the bare minimum of what I pay in expenses. I had to forego other bills to make the number as small as possible but instead he rescinded the offer. At the end of AX, my coworker is trying to tell me that 830 bucks was way too expensive and like it was a no brainer for Ross to decline. Meanwhile he self admitted that when he lived on his own, he paid 1600 bucks and ross pays way more than me for his home. So to be told by two other people that 830 bucks was too expensive and an egregious number to ask for was just gross.  

Ultimately though, did I get paid for AX 2024? Yes! But how I got paid was weird. It’s the end of the first day, and Ross is saying that we need a third person. My coworker said he has a friend that he can ask so he’s texting his friend. My coworker turns to ross and asks how much is the pay again, ross said minimum wage and then the friend agrees. I am sitting there, dumbfounded. I have sold at conventions before, this is not my first convention for ross, I flew out here for Ross, and the friend we brought on, has never done a convention before, is relatively local and Ross decided to pay him without question.

So I brought it up to Ross and he told me, “I can take you far.” He essentially offered me exposure in lieu of payment. He thought I didn’t believe him, but it wasn’t about whether or not he can. Why are you picking and choosing who to pay like this when I have actual experience and I flew out here.

Which he would never have taken me anywhere in my career, he uses his connections as more of a dangling carrot. He won’t go out of his way to actually introduce you to anyone in the industry and will actually get upset if you try to talk to his friends in the industry. The only people he has introduced me to are people he knows but aren’t artists, game devs, or anything of the sort. He even told me to tell him if there’s anyone he can introduce me to, but he’ll talk to them for 30 minutes and won’t introduce me. This happened multiple times. If you’re gonna use your network as a way to avoid paying me, you can’t just gatekeep that very same network from me.

Now the actual convention

It was weird in my opinion. Ross is very aware of appearances and how everything looked, which it’s a convention and that makes sense to a degree. But we didn’t have working lights on the first day and ross was just pacing around the booth, frustrated and upset. Did the booth look a little dull, maybe? But it was such a minor thing at the end of the day and it ruined his mood for the whole day.

He also didn’t buy electricity apparently…he eventually did but initially wanted to ask our neighbors for electricity. I refused to ask because they paid for theirs and our issues aren’t their responsibility.

Ross doesn’t like to work at conventions

A lot of people come for Ross but many times, I had to tell people that Ross isn’t here and won’t be here for a couple of hours. And sometimes he showed up at the time i said, or other times it’d be an hour or two later.

When he gets there and anyone ask him a question about the booth, he will literally slide out of the way and point to me or my coworker. He probably couldn’t run his booth on his own at all. He has even said, he wanted us employees to keep things running so he can, “do his own thing,” which tends to be to talk to his fans that tell him how much they love him or talk to his friends.

He’s in the exhibitor’s hall. He’s always been in the exhibitor’s hall but this year Ross was upset about the sales. The reason he told himself is that his people are in the artist alley, which I do agree to an extent, Ross is rarely in the artist alley.

The points that I brought up to him about his sales are as follows.
1. His dedicated fans have all the prints they want from him. Especially because Ross was on hiatus and didn’t come back with a good library of new prints, only a couple at best. It’s not a good sign when multiple customers have said, “I need to check my inventory before buying.”

2. A lot of people go to the exhibitor’s hall to buy more physical and corporate merch, they go buy their art in the artist alley. People tend to go to the exhibitor's hall first then the artist alley, especially because people accidentally go to the exhibitor’s hall first thinking it’s the artist alley, since it’s right there in your face and the artist alley is in the basement.

3. New people aren’t as enticed to buy prints from an artist they don’t know when you consider the price. Ross’ prints run 30 bucks or three prints for 60 (buy 2 get one free). With the state of the economy the way that it is, people are more conscious with their spending, even at conventions. When I told him this, Ross got defensive saying that his art is worth it, pricing it any less would cheapen his art. In my opinion, this falls into the charge what you’re worth mentality which tends to lead to very toxic pricing which leads to anti consumer pricing.

4. He says he doesn’t want to play the game and just paint what he wants, which is fair but then you can’t be upset about sales. Unless you meet your audience in the middle, you’re not gonna get any sales.

This next part made me realize how into himself Ross is. There was this fan that wanted to buy Ross and the employees dinner. We settled on KBBQ and Ross just didn’t want to do it, he wanted to have more separation and didn’t want it to become an obligation. Ross didn’t want to plan it so he almost gave this guy my number without my consent, i had to talk him out of it. We did have dinner with this guy and his friends, and they’re great people. The reason why we ended up going was because Ross was having a bad couple of days and said, “It’ll be nice to talk to someone who loves him. I’ll generate some good karma for myself…wait, not that I should do it for the good karma, but it’ll be a good thing to do.”

That was my latest experience with Ross at AX but the issues don’t end there.

He talks about his burn out in his latest youtube videos and seeking mental health treatment, but he presents this in a disingenuous way. In his youtube video he said he checked himself into a mental health retreat for a week. The issue here is the word retreat. There is no such thing as a mental health retreat in a clinical/therapeutic sense but definitely in a wellness and spiritual sense. Especially because he describes it as a group setting which isn’t normal when processing trauma. If you ever went down the spiritual rabbit hole, you’ll know how problematic these circles are and don’t encourage actual healing. Now if he went to this as something supplemental, that’d be one thing, but he uses language in his video to make it sound like a legitimate clinical setting when it’s not.

He has also told me that he got a spiritual download from his spirit guides that told, “The universe is here to support him. Everything in the universe is for him to use.” My experiences with him has supported this through and through.

This next part plays back into Ross talking about how bad his sales were at AX. If you remember, before Ross dropped off the face of the internet, he had a sale to clear out his merch because he wanted to come back with new merch. But then he went on his hiatus and then came back to cons with the same merch. And he refused to get prints of some of the stuff people were asking for. Prints like SAO, Ranni from elden ring, Wraith from Apex. He didn’t want to stock up on those, it feels like he’s treating conventions as a way to clear out the remaining inventory, when that’s what these sales were for back in 2023. We even had his mulan print up from 2016 at AX 2024, which is a beautiful piece but the style is so different and nothing about it screams mulan.

This last bit is a more serious accusation. He has only provided me very minimal evidence in the grand scheme of things so please use your best judgment.

Ross is working on a new project right now which is just another artbook and I can’t in good conscience encourage anyone to buy it. Something about the book just doesn’t feel authentic. This book is supposed to be a representation of Ross and his journey through life, his burnout, to the present and future. In my opinion, nothing about the art, the characters or designs are authentic to ross.

Below is a character sheet that Ross had shown me that he’s worked on for the main character of his new book and is currently the profile picture of his instagram. If you look at all the different versions, you can see that there are a lot of inconsistencies with the style, how he’s drawn and rendered. The weird oversized sleeve, the shorts, his hair and most important piece of all, the weird realistic render that’s cropped out on the left. That’s because all of this is ai, including his instagram profile picture. He has shown me and admitted to me in person that he has used ai but unfortunately these are all the pictures I have to show at the moment.

I’m well aware that some of these images aren’t released yet to the public, but the ones that will be released will have been painted over to hide any traces of ai.

I know any proof I have around this is sparse because he’s very intentional with when and how he shares images.

Below I’ve attached an image of his newest alphonse print, but I've also attached a wip that he sent of the piece. At first nothing looks out of the ordinary but then you look at the legs, there’s a lot of weird mechanical artifacts that don’t make sense. And since alphonse is a suit of armor, there should be some symmetry between the two legs. Which you may want to say that it’s artistic interpretation but that doesn’t explain the very realistic metallic render that he ended up painting over to hide his tracks.

These are supposed to be the landscapes in his book. Some of which feels very rossdraws but a couple feels nothing like what Ross does at all. I wish I had some of the larger files but ross tends to show these low res screenshots making it very difficult. But if you see some of these highlighted images and compare them to his other landscapes you should be able to put the pieces together.

Ross has also asked me on people’s take with ai multiple times as a way to see if people are becoming more open to using ai. So that way he’ll be able to eventually come out with it. I have shared him videos from creators talking about ai hate and he always leaves me on read.

I also suspect he’s taking a lot of the inspiration for his art from the people around him to the point of stealing.

His newest character that he’s posting everywhere, hollow, was a character that was made back on his twitch when he was streaming regularly. But there are aspects to this character that are present now that weren't back then. Now I know the first thought is that things change over time, but in ross’ newest video that he introduced this character, he tried to have a reason for every aspect of his design, but the eyes. He even gave a half hearted reason about the impression or the scar on his face. Saying that when you rest your hand on your face it leaves a scar, and that the glitch pattern is due to him having a carpal tunnel. He has never mentioned to anyone prior to this, or other people close to him that he has carpal tunnel, so I'm not inclined to believe this excuse. That and when I was at his place for AX, he showed me that he was playing around with this retro, grainy and bitmap texture because it looks cool. There was no real meaning behind this. Also because he asked for my opinion on the logo for his new book and which one looked better. It was all mostly the same but the only difference was a random symbol he drew. I asked him what it meant to him and he responded, “what do you mean? It just looks cool” but if this is supposed to be a book about you and your journey, it should have some meaning not because it looks cool. Which brings me back to the eyes. There’s a mutual friend that all the effects, patterns, and themes behind hollow that I believe Ross has taken from. Not just from inspiration but ripped from entirely. Because in the video, he has given no meaning behind these eyes but they are everywhere. This is not my story to tell but this is something that needs to be brought to light.

This character here, the main character of the book, was also called kid. Ross ended up changing the name of the character because he was allegedly caught copying the name and motifs of the character from our mutual friend. Who had a younger version of himself, with a demon character that had eyes and mouth motifs everywhere. Our mutual friend also has themes of retro games and techs for over a decade now.  These motifs weren’t originally present in the design and now ross is doubling down on including them everywhere he can without giving them a real meaning. He can say he took inspiration from our friend but the original idea was supposed to be about music and all the different aspects of yourself coming together like a symphony, it feels weird to switch from that, to eyes, demons, retro tech, bitmap textures. He also included a little sprite companion for this kid, just like our mutual friend who has a sprite like character with an eye, ross’ sprite like character just has two eyes. There’s such a fine line of taking inspiration from your friends, and taking everything they do, rebranding it, and calling it your original work.

Especially because if you tell Ross your own experiences or an idea that you have, he’ll hear it, dismiss it entirely but then bring it up again like it was his own idea. For example, we both have an Atlantis project but he did his nearly a decade ago and rarely touched it. I was talking about it when I was at AX, and at the end of the trip, he was inspired to bring it back for his next project. I also have an OC with the name icarus, and then when he learned the name, not too long after, he decided to make a project called Icarus. Small in hindsight, and I have no issues with people sharing ideas or having similar ideas, but this is a common thing that is going on. Even at conventions, he will tell me to go around and look for good ideas for him to use. And again, all of these aren’t problematic by themselves, but when you add the fact that he’s using ai and is so liberal with the use of photobashing, it makes you wonder about how he sources his ideas.

And in ross’ book, nimaverse, he has a self insert character of himself called flip that’s supposed to represent his love of cooking. But Ross is notoriously known for not cooking at all. And as someone who’s stayed with him multiple times, I can vouch for this, a really nice kitchen but all i see are salad kits, meal delivery and energy drinks. So why is your self inserting a chef with a cat, when you don't cook and have a dog? He also calls Flip a dream cooker, and our mutual friend is working on a game where you’re a dream chef.

Speaking of ross’ dog milo, I am very uncomfortable with how ross treats milo.
Milo doesn’t really have any toys to play with, the last time i stayed there ross bought milo a ball that he tore apart in an hour and thats it. He doesn’t give him any treats or snacks. And one day milo was bothering ross and ross just yelled at milo, but when I look around, it turns out his water bowl was empty and he just wanted water so I filled it myself. And the way ross yells at milo isn’t just a, you’re misbehaving yell, but it was a deep, low register, angry yell. This was just how he acted with milo when I was present so I can only imagine when I’m not there. This also just adds to my belief that he doesn't see things as what they are and only props. Because we only see milo when he has to make content for instagram and youtube.

Overall, his behaviors as a business feels more like a grift rather than creating for the sake of creating. His kickstarter for Nima was a mess, he kept saying he was making an anime out of his characters but you don’t hear anything about it, he made a statue of Nima and accepted pre orders for but there have been no real updates about it. I have asked him about the statue and if there are any updates but he has ignore those remarks and still brings the statue to promote at conventions. And during his hiatus, he has only made a post to promote that he’s selling at a convention or to launch a product, then we never hear about it again.

One last thing I want to mention about ross to speak on his inflated sense of self is that he compares himself to kim jung ji. He’s working with a publisher for his next book and wants to price it higher than necessary because kim jung ji books are also expensive. In my opinion, this is a comparison and a statement that never should have happened

One of the last things I will mention is that a part of me thinks ross may be racist or have racial biases. For context, I am a black man (haitian american). When we were having dinner one day, Ross decided to seat us by race, saying the koreans, the vietnamese and points to me and calls me the diversity hire. I just had to sit there and awkwardly laugh. I feel like everyone felt just as awkward but no one really said anything and we moved on.

Then Ross has this character in the book, a girl with dark skin tone and she was one of my favorites in the book. But overtime, he lightened her skintone, had covered her up so much, and gave her more eurocentric features overall. Below I only have two images unfortunately since again, he’s very intentional on what he sends. The first image is the original line up and the character on the right had her afro, a little darker, still covered but overall still looked great. Below that, he tried to make sure fro look more flowy and straight, removing those afrocentric features, and made her skin more yellow. I dont have the image of the current iteration but she’s even more covered up, while all the other characters are essentially naked/in bodysuits. He also has a bad reputation on depicting people with darker skin tones over the years. And it was alleged to me that used the N word, mainly when he was singing songs, but that doesn’t make it any more okay. There were other things much worse alleged to me, but it would be very obvious where he heard some of these from. And given the fact that he also fought me on payment but would pay my other employees without a hassle only makes me believe this further.

I’ve been told by many people to just let this go and hope that the consequences of his actions catch up to him, but this is how the cycle keeps perpetuating itself. Again, i can’t speak for other people that has worked for ross and nor do I want people to pester anyone else surrounding this topic. I’ve spoken to ross about my feelings on all these issues just to be told, thank you for telling me and honoring your truth and that he’s big enough to process and learn from this, but in order to protect himself and his energy, he needs to distance himself from me. Which left a bad taste in my mouth because I know it’s hard to hear criticism but to paint it as protecting himself from this “energy” sounds like a way to remove the only other person who is trying to hold him accountable for his actions. He doesn’t want to be held accountable, which means the next person to take my place in his life will only deal with the same issues as I have. There are probably other things I’m missing for now but this is all I can remember in the moment.