I have a question for the author of this stupid fucking article. What the fuck do you think half of the artists on the planet do? They use copyrighted images as reference when drawing fictional characters and they often end up looking very similar to the original. There are thousands of people on social media that sell these drawings on a regular basis.
Yes but image copyright is fickle thing, because at what point does it become not a copyrighted image? I have to reference the “Ship of Theseus” thought experiment, because it does sort of apply here. A fictional character cannot be drawn from a first hand perspective, so some sort of copyrighted image HAS to be used as a reference. So where does one draw the line?