Spriting... tracing?

[SND-Frostey]

^^^^ Bad topic name.
Anyway, here's something I'm wondering:  how reliable is making sprites by tracing 3d screenshots, imitating their shading, and then scaling them for size?
You can call it an idea, but I recently thought of doing it with many characters, like with Seth (SF4), El Fuerte (SF3) and maybe Krystal (starfox adventures), because of how un-often the angles change in the game.  What do you guys think?
EDIT: Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

[Dzayan, The Warrior]

it depends how good you are at drawing and colouring