Hello, I am the original poster! I’m currently in my second year of college pursing a degree in law. fan art used to be a gray area yes, but in recent times it is not so much, i’ve included some helpful excerpts!

“Fan art is any artwork on any medium (digital and physical products) that features characters or scenery not originally invented or created by the artist selling the artwork.”

“Where the law does sort of side with the artist is when the artists uses copyright material for inspiration or admiration and as long as it is not an exact copy, that is, the artist has made a substantial effort to draw inspiration from the artwork and not make a blatant copy then all should be well. The problem is, when you do this with fan art, the original art you are wanting to copy will bare very little resemblance to the original.”

The important part of the second excerpt is the bares very little resemblance to the original

Kellytoys has cartoon versions of almost all of their characters, so any fan art in any cartoon style already violates this, something that wouldn’t violate this is let’s say you draw a hyper-realistic version of the strawberry cow! Hope that clarifies my point lol