Quote Originally Posted by TheRealJoJo View Post
What? No it wouldn't. It's literally just as illegal to draw it as it is to photoshop it. No game company is going to issue a cease and desist for a $10 photoshop edit unless this person was making potentially thousands of dollars a month from it.
Yes, it would. Drawing what they want to showcase by hand, with their own entire toolkit of artistic skill would be different, the style WOULD BE DIFFERENT. They would be spending far more time and effort into drawing and recreating an ENTIRE scene from scratch than they would be lightly spending a few hours doing some editing work in Photoshop using a pre-existing screenshot from the game that they don't have to touch other than pasting down another image on top of it.

It's not illegal to draw fan-art using reference shots as tools to help. It's illegal to steal something that has a direct copyright on it and looks EXACTLY as it does, for example, the background of Costa Del Sol, and pass it off as your own entire work of art.

I've been in the art industry for over 12 years, it's illegal, and it can get you in trouble if the company feels like being that petty. I bet you think taking stuff from Google isn't illegal either.