Board Thread:Off-Topic Discussion/@comment-30602727-20140419162730/@comment-4042934-20140422203357

It is perfectly fine to study a pose shown in a book teaching you how to draw and try to recreate it in your own style and technique. This is the book's purpose after all, show you how to draw generic poses to practice so you can achieve more complex ones easily later on.

Putting tracing paper over the book's picture and tracing exactly the lines though, is indeed art theft. By this way, you learn nothing on anatomy, topology and prespective, three very important parts of both anime-styled and realistic painting in general. You just make a base out of a ready made picture and customise it. The only good that can come out of this is practice on inking, yet you still have to study on weighted ink lines.

Well, that's what I think anyway.