I know why he's doing it and it has to do more with the fact that the art is now in some sort of digital form that can easily be copied, stolen, and/or used by people in the manner he intended, but won't see any payment for. It's kind of the same thing with me when I completely redrew the apron art from TAF. I spent many tens of hours pouring over the scans I made and redrawing the artwork meticulously to make sure it was absolutely 100% dead on. From there, I went and recolored it to mach the rest of the game(something Bally never did as they just kept aprons to two or three colors). I "protected" my work by only uploading low-res jpgs so that no one would be able to just take my artwork and use it however and whenever they want. I did however send said artwork to those that were going to remake the TAF aprons in exchange for one when they started making them, but that never came to fruition and now there's a copy of my original vector artwork out there and I'm afraid of it getting out for anybody and their brother to use. If that happens, I'll be plenty upset, believe me.

Similar thing as when I completely redid the FiFJr artwork to Disney built cabinet accuracy. I was asked to redo that artwork by someone promising to pay me for my time, but never got paid. I spent over one hundred hours making it 99.99% perfect. When I realized he'd never be paying for that much time, I decided that I'd be the one controlling when and where they got printed and shipped out to people. I ended up only printing one set of cabinet art and shipping it out to who I was told was the famously multi-forum banned "K" man. At this point, there's nothing stopping him from scanning my artwork and selling sets of that artwork himself. But that's ok by me! I purposely put some markers/purposeful bits in the artwork that only I know about that will allow me to easily identify it as my artwork that someone must've bought from some unscrupulous soul.

I do regularly do artwork here on the forum for people and their restoration projects for free, but they're very small scale and I can usually crank them out in an hour or so and there is usually nowhere else for the owner to go for such work, so I'm happy to do it. Plus, it keeps the restoration quality up at a slightly higher level as some of these guys I've done work for, have no way of doing the artwork themselves and I like being able to see something like that done correctly and properly the first time.

Granted neither of us own this B/W artwork, it's all PPS's, but it's just a matter of protecting its use by people who can't redraw it themselves and just use the assets we spent many hours recreating. Keep in mind, most really good graphic artists charge $100/hr and up for their services. It's a very special thing to do well, and to have your work just yanked from you without your consent, or when you're not offering it up for free, hurts and really pisses you off.

Can you imagine if someone bought Aurich's original version of The Shadow translite, scanned it, and started selling it themselves? He would rain down fire and brimstone on them!