Not to condone image theft for ebay purposes, but 
to address the point you made about tracing 
earning just a mockery... fancels are kind of a 
breed unto themselves, as far as fanart is 
concerned. 

One reason is that while a lot of fanartists make 
art for a love of a show or character, fancel 
painters tend to paint either (a) for the love of 
painting [hopefully] or (b) as a smidge of income 
on the side. ;oP In other words, having a 
finished product to show is not so important as 
the time spent actually working on the piece of 
art. Fancel artists, for the most part, tend to 
paint to improve their skills, or paint because 
they've been asked to paint something by someone 
else, rather than trying to make a contribution 
to a particular community or fandom.

When people ask me to paint something, nine times 
out of ten, it's going to be, "I want this 
picture, no changes." I hardly ever get, "I like 
this character... why don't you play around with 
the pose and come up with something fun?" let 
alone "I have this original character that needs 
to be painted." Fancel artists tend to play the 
part of the cel painter, filling in the colors, 
rather than playing the part of the animator, 
coming up with something interesting from scratch.

I know that often, when I paint for myself, I 
come across scenes or shots where I think, "Ooh! 
*That* would be fun to paint!" And I make a 
screencap, and come back to it later when I have 
time. I expect most people who commission fancels 
do the same.

Again, I'm not saying that it's good to be a 
machine and just trace other people's stuff to 
cycle endlessly through ebay. But I am saying 
that there's a mentality in the fancel community 
that people don't care about original art... 
unless you've gone and stolen someone's pic. ;o)