hey - let me tell you something. i'm an illustrator. graduated with a degree in it and everything. you know what my professors had me do in school, every class i ever had? copy. copy someone else's art. in my drawing and painting classes, we would do 'master copies', which means we copied another painter's painting to see if we could replicate the colors and the brush strokes and the technique. the professors even had us trace them to get all the proportions right!
in my oil painting class, we only did one original painting out of the six we did across the semester. and you know what the original painting was? another copy - just of a photo we took ourselves. I took a photo of a plushie i had among some blankets and copied the exact photo, color for color.
in illustration, especially in the entertainment and animation industries, in storyboarding and animating and even character design and concept work, do you want to know what one of the most important skills is? copying. you want your characters to stay 'on-model', meaning they look exactly like how the character designer designed them, from every angle. it is a skill, and a very important one at that.
when i was a kid, i learned how to draw by copying other artists too. i saw how my friend in 7th grade shaded his drawings by taking his finger and smudging the pencil everywhere, so i did too. i saw how the girl who sat next to me drew fire with squiggly lines, so I did that too. I saw how artists online drew eyes, ears, noses, eyebrows, hands, shoulders, hair, and i integrated that into my art, piece by piece.
and someday you might come up with something on your own too, but the truth is that most of what you will incorporate into your style is from someone else. most artists develop their style by copying. so if you're developing your art style, and you like drawing in a certain style, and you're copying other artists to be able to work in that style, that's not 'fraud,' that's learning.
and in any case - it's still art. is a dancer less of a dancer because they can't make their own choreography, and can only dance to choreography given to them by someone else? is a singer less of a singer because they can't write their own songs, and only can sing covers or songs written by someone else? no, they're still dancers, they're still singers. and you're not less of an artist because you're drawing in someone else's style.
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