Photo manipulation is just an extension of the older comic art system of light boxing. Which in turn is quite similar to tracing or drawing with live models. The existence of photography and projection has allowed people to draw directly over a template of still images of real people or other art for decades and that's pretty much how most art is done. There are people who think that failure to modify a lightbox template sufficiently that others cannot recognize the source constitutes plagiarism. And of course, the original source can sometimes be genuinely amusing.
Another issue is that just as live nude models are preferred for fine art, nude and nearly nude lightbox sources are best for most purposes. Which means that comics and animation uses a
lot of pornography. This can lead to some really... interesting... poses and expressions in some comics if you look for it.
Which is a bit of a long walk to say that yes, those pictures are
obviously drawn over templates taken from magazines. And there's no shame in that, although it's generally considered at least tacky to make it obvious enough that people can tell that is what you are doing. White Wolf is no stranger to tracing images from magazines.
Camille Devereux is model Stephanie Seymour.
But the fact that these pictures are traced
from magazines is just the technique. It's a sub-professional level of art, but probably better than what I would come up with if you asked me personally to make the art on short notice. The main issue I have is what it is attempting to be - and that's just pictures of LARP outfits of Swedish edgelords. Whatever the level of the artists involved, I can't really throw stones. But I would expect the artistic vision to shoot a bit higher than "the outfits my friends wear to Friday night LARP." Like maybe the archetypes the friends are trying to evoke with their limited costume budgets and skills? Throw me a frickin bone here.
-Username17