dragon and some female head sketches

I've been flipping through a lot of Adam Hughes, Mucha, and Chris Sanders artwork trying to learn how to draw cute girls recently. In these cases what I like is the elegance of the design. Clear, effective, and what I consider deceptively simple. 

I still have a real hang up about directly copying images by other artists, even for educational purposes. I feel odd duplicating existing ideas directly. Even though it could help me grow, I feel hesitation there, because a repeated idea doesn't inherently seem like growth. It's not just a repeated idea though, it's vocabulary. The more visual words you know the better you can express with your tools. Imagine refusing to read existing words because they've been created already. It seems a little similar to me, if extreme.

I am trying to learn not to isolate my internal vocabulary from new ideas.