Better than stealing...

Remember way back when your were that kid whose only tools of trade in teh bag o' tricks were pencil and crayons and stuff like that, ah the small bricks of water colors, the cheap blue color box or color bricks where you'd brush the watery brush and ... blah ends here.
So, yes, better than even copy pasting, not caring about copyrights, etc why not trace the stuff you like as in the old school days :). After all there's no harm/copyright violation in getting inspired from an artform. So for lenny.in (crap this is 3rd day in making and its not yet out)... I needed some logos, some cool graphics for gmail, twitter and Lenny itself. Here's how I got it done -

1. Load original image/photo into ArtRage or MyPaint (on linux)
2. Start drawing... draw ... draw... draw some more
3. Resize into iconic/useful proportion, and smile.

Lol I might just have mislead you... but hey this obviously sounds like a safer practice than outright copy pasting media content from here and there.

Anyways so this is what I could get out of it (zoom to see brush strokes) -


and finally ->