Is re-creating an art from someone else’s art copyright violation and can be sued?

Let's say I want to create a flame like this one and use it in my app:

But, I'm not good enough to make it from scratch and make it look beautiful as in the link. So, instead, I copy the flame image from the link, paste into my graphic software and then use curve function to create the curves over the image in the link and create a flame vector art in this way for myself. Is this way of using someone else's work as template to create my own icon violation of copyright?

Even though, the final product looks the same, but it is not exactly the same, since I "created" it getting help from someone else's work. So, can I be sued for that?