From what I can tell from the Tremz image, volt is telling the truth about using the pen tool.
Let me explain:
Volt used the pen tool set to a cyan like color and the opacity turned down + some other changes.
Then he proceeded to paint over the original image with a large brush size, creating a "blur" effect and changing the color of the image.
Because he just drew over the image with a different color and the opacity turned down, you can still see a hint of yellow in the areas of the image that originally had yellow. He could have avoided this by first desaturating the image, but whatever.
He also seems to have used the select by color tool to select the background and fill it with black.
However, even with these changes, volt cannot claim that he "redrew" the image.
To do that he needs to draw the entire thing from scratch without using anything directly from the original image.
Btw
A far faster and less n00b way of doing this would be to:
Select by color the background with a decent threshold -> Fill with black to get rid of background design-> Select None -> Desaturate image -> Duplicate layer -> Colorize -> Blur -> Change Layermode -> fiddle with opacity -> Save as JPEG
Example result that took me < 5min using GIMP:
And here is volt's image overlaid with the original image:
Poll