randomly remembered how on deviantart in the aughts using images as references was treated as an actual cardinal sin. if a pose in something you had drawn by hand was 1:1 with an existing photo or another piece of art, it was considered the same as stealing. there were artists who sincerely insisted that references could only be used for practice and that if you wanted to draw something for the purpose of posting online you would need to have studied anatomy and color theory to the point where you could just Produce that thing from your mind with maybe the help of some general reference photos at best as reminders of what that thing looked like. insane amount of rigor to demand from a userbase of largely casual hobbyists. no wonder ms paint emo furry art is the only thing people remember fondly from that era.

the first thing they teach you to do in actual concept art school like for movies and video games is to immediately start tracing and referencing heavily. I spent about four hours a day doing nothing but copying classical sculpture casts with pencil at a standing easel. the teachers recommended we sell the finished drawings for some pocket money. these are the guys who did concept art for games like BioShock and Infamous. they had a Photoshop brush for everything: chainmail, chains, hair, leaves, grass, fur, sometimes entire chunks of drawings. this shit absolutely does not matter in the real world, ever. the only people who think it means anything are amateurs and hobbyists. Vermeer was tracing his camera obscura in the 1600s. Robert McGinnis, the painter who did most of the James Bond posters we're all familiar with, traces his opaque projector directly onto paper while manipulating the position of the picture to elongate the figures' limbs or change the spacing of their facial features. every commercial artist considers this kind of thing a basic skillset for the speed and quality of production they are required to produce.

this whole "bespoke handmade art with NO artificial flavorings" is nonsense, which is evident primarily in the quality of art it produces: bad anatomy, bad perspective, bad composition, bad colors, because none of these people know how to observe and interpret their surroundings