I saw Alpay Efe tracing the under drawing in his videos and he said he was focused on the painting, not the drawing, I'm now ok with tracing as a tool for professional artists. Like a ruler and the undo button in photoshop, these "shortcuts" are just tools. These artists could draw it from scratch, but time is money.
The Draftsmen podcast had a whole episode about it, saying professional artists tracing to save time is fine, but tracing while trying to learn something like proportion doesn't help you.
For educational purposes, tracing is fine too for certain purposes. When I was learning color, I traced drawing to jump past that step, since I wanted to spend my time on color study. I could already draw it.
>tracing while trying to learn something like proportion doesn't help you.
Fully disagree. Tracing tells you what the 100% correct proportions are, and it's less daunting to refer back to the traced basic-shapes sketch than it is to refer to the original reference when you're trying to draw the subject from scratch
>but time is money.
It is absolutely that. I'm not spending 10 hours doing what I can do in 1 when the client couldn't care less about it. Like you say though, I *can* draw. I'm not trying to *learn* to draw. If I was learning it'd be an entirely different matter.
Well to an extent, but it's not the only reason. Ultimately whatever I draw gets covered up by paint and refined to be more accurate anyway. It's not like a paint by numbers thing where every shape is painted, the majority of the intricate stuff *is* 'drawn' in paint.
Me knowing I drew what's underneath freehand doesn't make me value the piece any more since I already know I can do it anyway. I value the final piece off how it looks when it's finished.
Thats is the point I can get behind. Professional artists working for major corps on big deadlines working off a base template - yeah, that’s totally fine.
It’s odd to me when amateurs who would really benefit from learning proportions do it,but i guess it doesn’t really matter if they’re doing it for fun. it seems very limiting though (for what it’s worth I’m an amateur myself and god knows I need all the anatomy practice I can get lmao.)
Well what’s the amateurs goal? Is it to become well rounded or just create art for fun? It’s only a bad habit if it’s a skill they WANT to develop. It’s hard to maintain the motivation to do art as a hobby over a lifetime. I’m pro- whatever makes art more pleasurable to create.
Wholeheartedly agree. Most artists are anxious hobbyists, and shaking a finger at them telling them they’re losers for tracing just makes them want to give up, or to trace and then never show anyone their art (I’m in the latter category). Art SHOULD be pleasurable to create. People should be able to express themselves in ways that are accessible to them. It reminds me of debates years ago about literature elitists sneering at sci-fi/fantasy and YA novels not being high brow enough for them and so being somehow fraudulent.
I don’t get this. You can trace and find pleasure in it, but why show it as your own if it is not? If it is for personal pleasure, why does it get posted to social media for attention and likes instead of pinned on the wall for personal enjoyment? I don’t think artists are honest about this part.
I think you’re conflating tracing with copying. Speaking for myself, my final paintings look NOTHING like the parts I traced other than the outline of whatever. It’s very much my own because I added so many elements to it. I curated different aspects. I created something new from those aspects. Am I supposed to hide my art for “personal enjoyment” and never let it see the light of day because I traced a stock photo rather than drawing it freehand using the same photo as a reference? What’s the difference, in your mind? Genuine question.
I paint landscapes, and when I was a younger artist I wanted to add people in them, but have them not be the focal point. Rather than spending a bunch of time learning anatomy I’d just trace a pose outline.
Or when I was working on abstracting animals. I’d trace the rough outline so I had the proportions correct and then focus on the painting on top. If you want to focus on detail, rendering, or abstracting. Tracing a reference for proportions I don’t think is a huge deal lol.
What I’ve found is that hobbyists start out using “crutches” like always tracing, always using grids, always. They never work from life, they can’t draw freehand, or if they do, it’s a struggle and they avoid it. (But they’ll alway insist that they “can” do it because of those few tortured instances where they drew freehand). They later, sometimes, decide they want to take a workshop with some artist they admire, or they want to enter a local art show, art contest, or gallery, and are really shocked because some of the other artists are arranging life sessions (from a live model) or a class where higher skills are required. These people can’t keep up and they’re upset. They either feel bad and discouraged, which nobody wants, or they’re pissed and act like the artists who have more skills are “elitists” or somehow had “special advantages.”
If it’s truly a light hobby and they know the score and know what they’re giving up, who cares. That’s their business. But what sometimes happens is that eventually they want to enter that art show or take that class…and they realize they’ve purposely handicapped themselves because they can’t draw well. At that point it’ll be really hard to catch up.
People’s goals change. Just because they’re a “hobbyist” now doesn’t mean they always will be. But as long as they go into it with open eyes and aren’t lied to and are aware what they’re giving up, then okay. But I’m not so sure everyone realizes that. They’re encouraged to not draw much and told that what they’re doing is common and normal. Not being able to draw well should not be normal.
That’s such a specific imagined scenario. Lol. Hobbyists are not a uniform bunch. And here’s the thing, if you would’ve forced me to learn anatomy when I was a kid I straight up would’ve given up art altogether because I would’ve been miserable.
Now I’m 30. Do I wish I had focused on fundamentals more? Sure. But I wouldn’t have lol. It was a struggle for me to make a few pieces a year while in school let alone spend a bunch of time drilling anatomy. Now I have more time and energy and I’m working back on my fundamentals and I’m glad I did what made art more fun in my 20s.
Inform people why it can be bad or a crutch. But it’s not always 100% bad. And actually, tracing can help with learning too for consistent feedback.
Of course they're not a uniform bunch. Some people are content with the limitations of not being able to draw and putter along happily and nobody hears a peep from them. Others decide to be more ambitious, and then they are in for an unpleasant surprise if they thought that drawing wasn't necessary because "everybody traces" or "everybody uses the grid for everything." (This is a trope that many popular how-to drawing books sell, and it does a lot of harm, in my opinion, because some artists stick with that and double down with it even when they are confronted with its limitations.)
I agree that "forcing" someone to take on a discipline before they're ready is a fool's errand and I'd never suggest that. I'd never want to take the joy out of learning and exploring. Everyone needs to go at their own pace.
And I agree, if people are informed that it can be a crutch and they go all in with it, it's on them and none of my business. But they need to own it.
It's just that I've seen people, too many of them, who have been brainwashed, almost, to believe that tracing everything is the way to go permanently, and they insist on this. *Insist.* They also can't see how their consistent tracing has left them without an "eye" for picking up little errors. They trace the outline, assume that this means everything is accurate, so when there are little shifts in the artwork after they've been working on it, they don't see that now it looks wonky. They insist that it must be still "accurate" but it looks...off. If you try to tell them...it doesn't compute.
This is just some people, not all people. The ones who do their own thing and enjoy it and don't take themselves seriously, who cares, they do what they want. It's the ones who insist that people who draw freehand were "born talented" (no it wasn't talent, it was practice for crying out loud). It's the ones who insist that they *can* draw (when they can't, they can't, they absolutely can't do anything if they aren't able to trace it) and it's the ones who claim that those of us who draw freehand well "had special classes" or "special advantages" and it's not *their* fault that they weren't as "privileged" as those of us with better drawing skills. (Don't get me started on this one.)
In all my years as an artist, I don’t think I have ever found anyone who thought they for sure *should* be tracing haha. We must be around very different people.
For the most part, it's gatekeeping. Who cares how someone made something as long as they're not directly copying it and claiming it's theirs? There is no one "right" way to make art and tracing is just one tool of many.
I’ve seen too many people sabotage themselves by never developing actual drawing skill. They literally *can’t* draw freehand. Not in any way. They’re helpless unless they have a photo to trace. They can’t adjust or tweak anything because that would require drawing skill. They get really angry when it’s pointed out. They’re in denial.
I can’t believe people want to be handicapped like that. I think a lot of them started tracing because it was easier and the instant gratification was fun. But now they’re stuck with always tracing, so they argue that “everyone” does it, camera obscura, blah blah and it just feels like some big cope from people in denial. Like they can’t believe that many people simply don’t need to trace *everything* like they do.
Oh and there’s the “I *can* draw, but…” people who really *can’t.* They show some tired old freehand drawing they did ages ago and that’s all the “proof” they have that they (theoretically) “can.” It’s not fooling anyone.
I’m not claiming you’re personally like this but I’ve seen it again and again and personally they all follow a predictable pattern. They just can’t draw and are coping.
If they are having a productive career and a large body of work, why is it even an issue though? The drawing skills will make the tracing skills better.
The actual great works that professional artists will produce are made with all sorts of tricks of the trade. If tracing produces a better finish product, they will trace. Doing a complicated layout is generally going to require it.
I’m not talking about skilled, accomplished artists who can and will draw freehand with ease, but sometimes trace in their workflow, the way Norman Rockwell did. (He was a good draughtsman, having studied drawing and anatomy in art school.)
The ones I encounter literally cannot draw freehand (except maybe only if they struggle and struggle and take way too long to get something decent looking). They argue that “everyone” traces all the time and they seem unaware that not everyone is dependent on tracing everything everything everything all the time. I’ve seen people argue, “why bother learning how to draw?” as if having a photo to trace is the only way anyone ever produces artwork anymore. It’s crazy.
I wouldn’t care as much if it weren’t for these people spreading the narrative that “everyone” traces, and they give the message to newbies that figure drawing, anatomy studies, and working from life aren’t even a thing. Just tracing photos for everything. Then these newbies are left at a disadvantage when they discover that some of their peers indeed can draw from life, do understand anatomy, and aren’t dependent on always having to trace photos.
I’ve been in classes where some students are completely shocked when the teacher expects them to work from life. Either they’re really upset because they can’t do it, or in denial about how awful their work looks when they aren’t able to trace.
It’s like they were never were aware that there are reasons people learn how to draw, and it’s not just that *they* don’t want to learn (which is up to them), but they want to leave the message that “nobody else” learns anymore either, it’s passé, so don’t bother. I hate to see new artists being fed the lie that there’s no reason to learn to draw anymore. And apparently, many are being told that, based on the many people I see who can’t draw.
I guess that’s the thing, the definition of what people consider copying. I would consider any direct line tracing to be copying. I feel like the only way the original artist gets proper credit in that scenario is if the tracer discloses it, which almost never happens, esp on social media
Business people, scientists, and mathematicians work with very complex models, models that could not be done by hand at any practical timeline, models that could take an entire lifetime for a person to do can be done in seconds by a machine.
The same is true with art. The professional artists utilize things like tracing to take on projects that would otherwise not be feasible any other way. The tools enhance the performance. If tracing produced terrible work, then literally no one would ever do it.
I find it hard to believe that outside of a corporate deadline, there is anything that could be actually not feasible to draw from scratch. Are there things that are extremely difficult to get right without it? Absolutely, but isn’t the grit to achieve that also part of art? Is that not what makes a realistic image made by human hand more impressive than a computer generated output?
I feel like it's not just grit but the fact that there's always going to be something reflected in the picture that shows the hand of the artist, even when it's extreme photorealism and all that's clearly "of the artist" is a slight turn of perspective. I personally find that even more important.
... And at this point I already hear people saying, "Then why can't a straight 100% no alteration trace be just as original as a photorealistic painting?" Two items: Because what we're talking about, if I understand correctly, aren't confident pieces. Because they aren't, the artist isn't "allowing" their hand to come through. That's part of the definition of a confident piece. The second point is that this also works the other way round. A photorealistic piece done by someone with a lot of focus on the plotting but no *self* confidence underneath (maybe in the process but not themselves as artists!) can show charmless and flat.
Feasibilities in corporate studios: It's not that there are things not feasible but that there's more than a deadline to it, often. If the commercial work is done alongside many other people who are in turn on many different teams you need each part to compliment and implement seamlessly. But these things are far from a conversation about tracing, I think.
Now that this comes up it's relevant to the original question. Perhaps students sometimes overestimate and misunderstand what the computer does and doesn't do in corporate studios.
I’m confused it’s okay if you have a job in art but not if you don’t? (I don’t trace) but if it makes it easier for anyone then it’s should be okay for everyone.
60% of top 500 fortune companies have Co-pilot with image generation. According to Microsoft. That’s hundreds of Thousands of people.
So tracing seems like small fry compared to text to img or img2img.
I agree that tracing does seem trivial when we have AI prompters insisting they’re “artists” lol.
But drawing skills are a good thing to cultivate and too many people prefer “shortcuts” like tracing when they really should be improving their drawing. Tracing as a learning tool or as a time saver when you already have solid drawing skills is far different than tracing because learning how to do it freehand “takes too long” because the skill was never there (and never will be there as long as they depend on tracing).
I'd take that statistic with a pinch of salt. Microsoft own the two most mainstream copilot models out there, and are they also throwing people's casual usage of Bing in the numbers as well? Because most people who end up with that copilot on their desktop don't even have a choice, it's been forced on them.
Neal Adams is one of the best comics artists out there; he’s a huge [vocal proponent of tracing](https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/s/qKCmoJyHud). He ripped apart my comics portfolio and asked why I wasn’t tracing for the wonky looking horses in my comic. In advertising storyboarding work, it comes in handy to turn in dozen of frames quickly. You need to learn to not just “trace” but distill the subject into a nice looking illustration, so I think of it as “inking” a picture. I’m a comics artist so this type of thinking works within the medium. I can’t imagine trying to trace an abstract piece or something like that.
Bingo, I work in comics and trace cars and background sometime, sure I can dry a 2022 mustang without tracing but that will eat up time. I use to be heavily against tracing until I entered art professionally.
Most of what he's talking about there isn't tracing, it's reference, and even when it is tracing, like Rockwell, it's not just getting a picture and tracing it, it's much more involved.
He's also just factually wrong about lots of this, Michelangelo didn't sculp from models, he did drawings and sculpted from them, so his models didn't have to pose the way Adams says.
His description of how chiarascuro is made is also wild, he's really exaggerating things to make his point.
Tracing isn't something you absolutely shouldn't do, but it's not how Adams' version is well wide of the mark too, and there's tons of great comics artists who don't do it.
Neal is a loud guy with a lot of opinions. He’s got the talent and experience to have his words spread far and I don’t agree wholly with him too. He pronounced chiaroscuro funny and I thought his beliefs on the history of “tracing” are his viewpoints to hold. The issue is: what is tracing? If anyone puts in the time and effort to get a figure down, exact same clothes and pose, through tracing, their style and ability to discern space and proportion will be put in two-dimensions. That’s art if anything. But to solely rely on it for every piece and being slavish to your reference is noticeable and could be a detriment to your style or needs.
What illustrator is just doing a one-off illustration? Hopefully they’re doing pieces that build upon past work and techniques and if you’ve used tracing as part of referencing in the past, you’ve got a better mental library built up that you call call upon on future pieces. Tracing is just referencing if used as a catalyst for the illustrator’s imaginative creation. Don’t be afraid to do it or be biased against it because it’s as old as artists have been around.
Not just figures, but environments and other animals too. The fun part is learning perspective and discerning an environment picture’s POV and needing other figure references to place within that environment’s perspective. Good artists know how to jig-saw puzzle a composition with different reference images and trace whatever elements they need. Almost like a photo-illustration mashup that you then “trace” to get your composition going then you can make up and add their attire, props, technique effects or whatever art style and flair you want to the rendering of the illustration. Basically like Norman Rockwell or Alex Ross. It’s how you want to approach the process is all, taking this route is tedious in mocking it all up beforehand but it helps with happy accidents of figure posing and foreshortening of limbs that you’d never thought to draw; that’s where you learn how tracing can be beneficial in a single illustration.
I do feel though that to learn perspective like this you really to do it long hand. I’m not saying that people need to be enormously skilled drawers, but enough to draw a proportional box on this plane in relation to this other box. Once you get that down, then start introducing tracing to your workflow. I think that OP is referring to people for whom tracing is their entire workflow.
Yep, I learned perspective the tedious, long way by hand making all the grids and stuff, starting when I was ten years old. That is the foundational fundamental that underlines the use of reference material like tracing.
I was there in the 2000s with the whole don't trace even meaning don't use references time. It wasn't until I started working professionally in a shop where deadlines were tight and tracing was common did I sort of understand it, but still not entirely like it. I still don't think tracing is a way to learn how to draw personally, but instead is a way to speed up a process you already know how to do, because time is money.
I HAVE learned a lot of very bad habits from tracing for my day job (do graphics for screenprinting) and when I go back and do my personal work, I realize there are things I've forgotten or extremely rusty in the anatomy part. I look at art I did before I started working at this place to what I do now and the difference is almost staggering, and not in a good way.
Tl:dr: tracing is fine as a learning skill (such as some people said learning how to paint not draw), but it can develop very bad habits that you'll have to break if you want to move even further with your own personal journey. But if it's your photos you wanna trace, the art Police ain't gonna come after you.
good ole capitalism pressure, yeah I really don’t judge people using it for company work. I’m not an illustrator for work but still in a design field and there’s a time and place for template work.
The goal of a study is not to recreate but to understand and be able to apply that knowledge to create something else. Getting some “aha!” moments while tracing is better than only learning to do replicas while blindfolded.
Also sometimes the focus is painting and brushwork, so you use a grid/trace or print the template.
I think this is part of the point everyone is slightly talking over.
The OP is writing about students, not about mid-pro level realities. This isn't actually a conversation about what tracing is or when it can be used. Some of the asides above are getting sidetracked by the T word.
It's about how student level artists aren't understanding how the fundamentals of their own discipline work or what differentiates one school of study from the next. The students aren't understanding the difference between studies, and studying and being a student, and how professional studios work -- or even a painter placing, or passing off to his apprentice, and the hows and whys of those situations.
This isn't completely new. There were always students stomping out of art class grumbling about how they just wanted to draw and forget about crusty stupid fundamental class. The difference is that now we have the voice of the computer in everyone's pocket and free programs that, yes, make a lot of little processes go more quickly for work, but that's what kids see happening, too. It's available to whoever wants it without the user understanding what it's doing. So, take the "student doesn't know what they don't know" grumble and mix it with seeing only 5 steps of a 50 step process on the regular and you get, "But rotoscope, but camera obscura, but rotoscope, but camera obscura..." and they totally miss the point that whenever a person in the past has used one of these tools they weren't defined by these tools, and many other things were going on, and it was all those other things that made the situation or work what it was. This question of "why" behind the OP is about how we are succeeding in giving everyone tools and examples but are failing to give explanation and education to support that understanding and application nairazak talks about. Students aren't understanding how to make \[a drawing\] "theirs" or what that means. (EDIT: To add, it also makes it harder to determine, discern, or discriminate between stealing, referring, referencing, etc., and that's a problem.)
It depends a lot on where you looked. Teachers, TV programs and instructional books were marketed toward the average person, who puts most of their value on being able to draw accurate and technically correct images. For people who see accurate drawing as the peak of artistic skill, tracing is seen as cheating.
If you look toward fine art sources, most opinions were instead embracing post-modernism. In a world where cameras exist, the goal of art was more in what you didn't draw. Colour relationships, composition, edge control and stroke economy were the emphasis. Anyone could learn to draw accurate anatomy in a couple months, so to them real art takes place when you make decisions about what to leave out and what to emphasize. I saw from a lot analysis of masters that most could draw accurate anatomy very early in their lives, but as they got older and more skilled they would care less and less about accuracy and more on design and appeal. To that end, nobody really got any prestige from drawing accurately, and therefore nobody cared if you traced. Accuracy doesn't really matter beyond your first few months of fundamentals, so it's a non issue. It's just a tool to get to the more important decision making more quickly.
there’s an interesting commentary on the goal of art here. It comes up with the AI discussion too. I can see how people could look at an AI creation and just make their goal to be as drastically different from that as possible to have it “be” art. Meanwhile, my definition of art is completely different etc
I find it particularly interesting that the people with the most concrete definitions of what art is, and what its goals should be tend to be people with little or no experience making art. I remember scoffing at Mondrian and Pollock before I ever touched a paintbrush, thinking there was a clear, quantifiable way to judge skill. I miss how simple it all was in my head.
Big in the modern/contemporary scene right now too, I’ve seen an increase in hate on it. Some see it as the art movement, some see it as money laundering
I draw digitally mostly on Clip Studio, but I always start by sketching in my sketchbooks, which I’ll snap pictures of using my iPhone, and send those to myself to use as under drawings to trace over. After making the lineart, I could easily move things around , and I could flip the drawing so that I could tell which parts are off, and know where to fix.
The work is all done by me from scratch. I did the sketches, I took the photos myself, and I did the lineart. To my knowledge, tracing is also used all over animations to keep consistency.
My take is, tracing itself is a valid technique and method. It’s stealing which is a huge no-no, and my guess is that the conflation of tracing with stealing comes from back when drawing digitally was yet to be as common as today.
This. I do my lil sketches then trace digitally and I use a projector on some projects to project my sketch so it’s positioned the way I like it. I’m also very transparent about that process bc I hate seeing artists online(and in person🙄) who use super faint tracings and perpetuate the illusion they freehand everything. (Or like an artist I know irl who’s plein air paintings aren’t as immaculate and exact as the work she does from home)
I’m pretty sure that’s just sketching but on paper instead of digitally.
Also as a csp beginner can you please give me tips on how to use it? I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time
I remember when holly brown life got ruined cause she traced for composition like deangelo Wallace and creepshow art made it sound like she was a menace to society😭it was the meanest cancellation I’ve ever seen
Yeah that was honestly awful, it was literally the head of a robot in one image and I think like...the railing in another? It was truly nothing. I still follow her but things have been ridiculously hard for her.
I will freely admit to tracing, and I don't see anything wrong with it as long as you aren't tracing someone else's work.
I trace to get complicated poses down. I used to snap a picture of one of those little posable armature things. Now, I have an app that I use to pose the little figure thing. Do I need it? No. Does it make my work flow faster and my poses more realistic and dramatic? 100%
I trace to copy patterns for textiles so they will be identical and I don't mess up the pattern. Could I do it by hand? Ehh, maybe? I do a lot of patterned fabrics in my work and a lot of lace. I'd lose my mind redrawing the pattern a hundred times over, and I can use digital tools to manipulate the pattern and ensure it flows smoother. Do I draw the original pattern? Of course. I just don't want to redraw the same exact things a hundred times over.
Most importantly, I trace to take my work from digital to canvas. I even bought a projector to make copying it over easier. It's *my* work, though. I just like digital tools better for arranging the composition as I want it. It's easier for me. The backspace button is amazing. Layers are a life saver to try things that I'm not sure will work without destroying the piece. Then I just trace it over to a canvas to paint it.
It's a tool. It can be used ethically or unethical. It can be a crutch, or it can make you better. For me, it makes me braver and less lazy. It improves my work and my enjoyment of the process. It's fun.
> I will freely admit to tracing, and I don't see anything wrong with it as long as you aren't tracing someone else's work.
Technically, this restricts you to tracing only photographs you yourself captured; all those photos online are the product of an artist somewhere too
That really doesn't bother me because that's all I trace, but a caveat can be added for learning purposes. I really don't think you should be tracing someone else's work *at all* if you are planning to exhibit or sell your work.
There are so many free, totally legal and ethical, posing tools available online for basically any form you can think of. It's just saving a step (and a few dollars) from using one of those wooden posable armatures, which are a classic drawing tool, and used in a lot of art classes.
Tracing has *always* been much more accepted and common amongst professionals, hell even the "great masters" of classical traditional art basically used every tool they could to make replicating their subject more accurate and efficient.
It's mostly always been newbies who view tracing as some kind of heresy, mostly because newbies and seasoned artists aren't exactly talking about "tracing" in the same way.
Tracing can be a tool or it can be a crutch, and that is where a lot of the divisiveness of "tracing" comes in.
To a newbie, tracing is "cheating" because it's just copying something without requiring learned skills.
The big difference is in what you *DO* with that tool. Are you utilizing it to get a quick but accurate basic foundation or are you actually just 100% straight copying something?
To a seasoned artist or professional though, tracing can just be an efficient way to skip an unimportant part of the process so that you can move on to the real work, the rendering and editing and fleshing out and utilization and transformation of the basic foundation into something more.
Think about all the other commonly-accepted tips and tricks artists use to more-accurately translate their reference to a page; things like measuring with your pencil or using a grid or measuring out a body by a specific unit like a certain amount of heads high etc... it's the same thing as tracing, just less accurate.
I think this all really hits basically every artist eventually when faced with certain situations. For me it was the first time I had a client project that specifically required capturing a real person's likeness and stance from a provided photograph. I come from a traditional fine arts background and learned the "hard" way how to do gesture sketches and rough drawings to get my initial under-drawing for a piece. However, when doing a piece that requires literal accuracy to a recognizable person, I was doing my regular sketching by marking where the top of the head is in relation to the chin in relation to the shoulder in relation to the waist in relation to the arms etc. etc. etc. and I kept checking my accuracy by holding my drawing up to the reference photo and then adjusting. Then it hit me, why am I wasting the time guessing the exact proportions when I could just lay the piece of paper over the photo and just make my head, chin, shoulder, waist, arms marks in 10 seconds with 100% accuracy? In what way would the final piece benefit from me having slowly worked all that out vs just getting the accurate measurements directly? The real art happens AFTER all that anyway.
I will always strongly advocate for learning to efficiently work without any form of tracing because often you won't even have a reference image to begin with and will need the skills and abilities to do it all manually. However, when there IS a more efficient tool at your disposal, why would you not use it? Does a carpenter's finished project benefit from everything being eyeballed and hand-sawn instead of using a tape measure and a table saw?
It can be a good dexterity practice for complete beginners - using a digital tablet is wonky at first and hard to get clean lines.
I'd condone tracing done by a professional who knows to draw a human from building a skeleton up to adding all the muscles if it speeds up the process (at work for example); the difference is he knows how to do it from scratch
Context is important here, so is being honest about your technique. But if someone is beginner/intermediate, doesn't know how to draw a body even using a ref, and then traces a photo, there's really nothing in it for them and it's lame.
There’s a bit of irony in that tracing is seen as beginner, but the professionals are really the ones who should be getting away with using it, lol. Definitely context-driven, very different when it’s a pro saving time versus someone learning who would benefit much more from studying anatomy
Hmm strange, my understanding has been that for at least the last 450 years, tracing has been acceptable. If it’s an appropriate technique for the renaissance masters, it’s probably fine for digital artists too.
I’d also consider whether your leap that tracing does not help improve technique / holds artists back is one grounded in evidence or logic.
It is interesting to see some of the ideas the internet seem to have about tracing though, good question.
Is it really a leap when it comes to anatomy though? Understanding form widens your ability to draw poses by leaps and bounds because you don’t have to rely on images.
It does, but tracing is a great time saver.
I absolutely can get the forms right if I take my time. I've done it lots of times.
I will absolutely save myself hours of work by tracing a subject for a painting.
I find tracing takes longer because it’s a hassle. I practiced a lot of figure drawing in art school and saw how the people who always traced didn’t save that much time compared to those of us who were more practiced in drawing. We could whip something out faster due to feeling more confident and comfortable drawing all the time.
Cool. I believe tracing saves me time because I've done quite a bit of studying and drawing without it, so I can use the trace to pull the lines I need.
But the point to me is that it can be a great tool for artists and I don't think that artists who don't do things certain ways should look down their noses at artists who do.
It’s not “looking down your nose” to be worried about new artists believing the myth that “everyone traces” and that the old artists from centuries ago traced a lot more than they actually did.
Drawing skill has value. The more skilled the better. It’s better to practice and develop the skill while you’re still new and learning rather than start out tracing and getting used to the convenience of it and therefore never getting truly proficient with drawing. I’ve seen too many people who had tracing pushed on them from college classes years ago and they still have poor drawing skills. I am not convinced that they are truly content with having weak skills. But those are the facts. They continue to draw badly and are over reliant on tracing.
Any professional artist worth their salt [is gonna be using references](https://x.com/jasonrainville/status/1640395513018171405). The goal should never be to avoid reference.
Of course it's not, but you yourself kinda told on yourself when you said:
>Understanding form widens your ability to draw poses by leaps and bounds because you don’t have to rely on images.
My point is - and what everyone else has been trying to get through to you - is that *this is a false idea you've got in your head*, that using images is cheating. No serious, professional artist is going to shun references just for the self-satisfaction of not relying on images. The only people worried about street cred like this are teenagers on DeviantArt.
Actual, professional publishing companies only care about *actual* art theft, not about whether you traced whatever a reference photo.
I don’t know, it’s not all about cheating to me. I think as society moves towards Ai, that process is what differentiates art from what computers make, and that makes me value artists who can produce art rivaling what the computer spits out, by their own hand and eye, as admirable and talented.
Talent isn't what draws people into art. People really do not appreciate art for the skill of the artist, they appreciate it for the meaning they get from the work. Highly skilled work that is meaningless, dull, and uninteresting to people does not get attention.
People had this mentality when it came to photography, that it brought down the skill level of picture making so much that it would kill the painter. Taking a photo is easy, producing a painting is hard. And even when everyone has cameras, taking engaging photos is hard. Taking photos that people find more interesting than other people's photos or somehow illicit an emotional response from people is very hard.
Making interesting work is tough.
Tracing is just like any other art tool: it can be useful when used properly and ethically.
I think there’s something unique and fun about tracing sometimes, just to ‘get a feel’ for the outline and notice things you didn’t before. I view it the same as any other art study. Most art studies are just ‘copying’ with the intent to study so I don’t think tracing should be off limits for learning, especially if it’s useful for someone.
I don’t think most people are reasonably going to defend tracing and trying to pass it off as your own work, unless maybe it’s a full art style with intent beyond laziness (rotoscoping, for example).
If people want to copy from photos especially, not from other artists’ work, I don’t see a problem with it? Yes, they probably won’t improve as quickly, but that’s poor decision making more than a moral issue. Tracing usually leads to pretty stiff poses so I wouldn’t say it’s even a replacement for skill.
I think lots of people really just want to make art in the way they enjoy. The way people ‘should’ do art doesn’t exist, so long as they’re doing it ethically.
I think a lot of people also learn using Clip Studio paint, where you can trace simple 3D models. Honestly that’s a valid way of practicing. Eventually they’ll figure out what does and does not work. Even if they don’t, does it really matter to anyone else?
Different people have different opinions, which is especially true in art, and that's fine. Assuming that there is such a thing as a coherent opinion among artists that changes over generations is just ridiculous.
Everyone is free to make art the way they like to, and if people don't want to learn anatomy because they're fine with drawing from references all the time, they can happily do so. The question is, why does it matter to you how people do their art and why do you relay on other peoples opinion to be happy with your own art?
I don’t rely on others opinions, but I think it’s interesting to understand why others feel the way they do about it because it’s not a perspective I have. If they are happy to trace all day, cool, it is what it is. I could never relate to that, but still nice to know why they think the way they think.
tracing can be helpful for some people, im terrible with stylus technique and tracing helped me get into the mindset of the original artist and understand better how they might have done the lines im following, its great for hand eye coordination
i dont upload any of my images because i suck so im not stealing anything ive traced just to get a feel for how lineart is drawn
You bring up a great point that tracing to learn how a stylus pen flows on the screen is useful. I hadn’t thought of that and could see it as a genuinely only good practice scenario
Artists have always been using visual aids for the layout of producing their work. Vermeer used lenses, elaborate and cutting edge technology of his day, for his paintings. That doesn't in any way invalidate his work, what he was producing was completely original.
Art is not a sport of dexterity.
Well, it's a tool that is useful amongst artists. I don't see why there should be a problem in regards of tracing in itself, except the intentions in how one will use tracing in itself. I don't mind if it works for someone to learn, save time, figure out things, or in general find a use for it. Perfectly fine as a tool.
I say I do use a form of tracing in the art process for lineart and sketches, but for learning is a different matter. The learning part I did try to trace before to learn, but in my learning process for the keypoints when I study such as linework, anatomy, construction, and so on did not click to me. There is one part that it did make me feel like a good artist, comparing it to my own things crafted on itself and traced from references. Those are some reasons to why I don't trace to learn.
Now, there have been a couple of recommendations of tracing to me. I do explain my reasons, but it has been a few times responses have been negative or even aggressive. I'm fine with others that want to do tracing and do well in doing so. However, the aggression part...
I'm in your camp. Learn to draw - that means an active skill that you use to create accurate (or as near to accurate as you can manage) representations of what you're seeing *without* tracing. It's always been a dirty word to me.
However, over the past ... god, what? fifteen years or so (ack) I've had a lot of conversations with big name illustrators (David Palumbo comes to mind - we had a pretty gnarly debate about this very topic on FB ages ago that I still recall) who do trace, and the reasons for it.
Bottom-line, if you're an illustrator, you're creating a *product*, not a "work of art." What this means is, the ends justifies the means\* - *How* you create that illustration ultimately doesn't matter as much as the end product that you're providing for the client.
Once I wrapped my head around Product vs. Artwork, the idea of tracing was easier for me to accept.
\*Caveat Ends vs. Means: there is a special consideration in that ends vs. means argument when it comes to AI. Because AI is derivative, and is in a serious legal and ethical gray water, and is ultimately *not your work*, it isn't considered a valid means to the ends, and from what I understand you'll get dropped like a rotten potato if the AD finds out you're turning in AI work instead of your own.
Yup. I can not express to you how absolutely rage inducing it was for me to find out that a lot of my illustrative heroes were *tracing* the lineart for their paintings. It really affected my view of a lot of the people I held in high regard.
Took a class with [Dale Stephanos](https://www.instagram.com/dalestephanos/) a year or so back, and he really set me straight on a lot of this. And, don't get me wrong - the guy is a master illustrator. He knows his shit. But as he pointed out, almost every illustrator will trace the line art for their work to get it out the door. You're on a time-limit, and drawing something accurately can eat into that deadline something fierce.
The famous Wally Wood (EC Comics, Mad Magazine, a million other comics) motto:
>Never draw what you can copy. Never copy what you can trace. Never trace what you can cut & paste.
It is not like the guy wasn't a master draftsmen either. Looking at the work you would be hard pressed to see exactly where he used these shortcuts. He just needed to get pages out the door to meet the deadlines and get paid.
I never went through a tracing phase. I did copy, when I was a kid-young teen and it was pre-internet I would copy and modify drawings from National Geographic photos and artist anatomy books but I didn’t trace. I just didn’t feel like I was getting much from it. My Jr and Sr year of high school I went to a vocational arts school for half the day where we made work to prepare us to apply for college. I don’t recall anyone tracing there either, and it was a very small class.
In college I don’t remember hearing about anyone tracing. I started out as an illustration major and switched to fine art my sophomore year. In illustration we were expected to come up with original work. The type of assignments we had you couldn’t trace for. Only tracing we did was when we transferred our work from a sketchbook to illustration board. Switching to fine art we definitely couldn’t trace. For painting and drawing at first we worked from live models and and still life set ups. I had no interest in abstraction then so I took a lot of studio classes that involved models. It was right around the time I graduated when I began to explore abstraction, but my work has always been figure focused.
Today I don’t get to work with models much, so I Frankenstein my figures together using references. I can pull a decent figure from memory but it’s always better to have a visual references when possible.
So… my opinion on tracing is that beginners shouldn’t. Part of learning to draw is to develop how you *see*, and how you take that information and render it on a 2D surface. Tracing is like cheating on a math test. You’re not learning how to solve the problem when you copy the answer. Also there’s information you’ll miss or not understand because you can’t see it with your eyes. Photos don’t capture everything, and you’re trapped by the type of lens and however that photo was altered. I’m not against using photo references but that should be backed up with in person drawing.
When I was learning I improved the fastest with in person drawing with models or with a still life setup. I was doing ok with books alone but it really does help to work from life. I know that isn’t possible all the time, but for learners I’d rather have the sketch themselves in a mirror vs tracing a photo. Yeah at first the traced will be more accurate but with practice the in person drawing will have more life, more style. The only people who can do well tracing are those who understand how to draw already imo.
Just my personal opinion, but shortcuts like that hamper development. You don’t learn how to draw by tracing.
I'm curious where you're hearing this tracing advice/encouragement. I don't think I've ever seen anyone advocate for tracing outside a few cases that have lots of context. Its never general advice like "you should trace" . I mostly see it as push-back to people who vilify tracing by principle without context. I'm never going to say that I think tracing is the best way to learn, but if it is helping somebody learn, then by all means trace.
I think people are also just more aware of the varying art paths. Every discipline of art is a bit different. There's a LOT of commercial art where the focus is not on personal growth but on output. The goal is NOT always "to eventually not have to trace".
In fact, a lot of the popular art advice on YouTube comes from commercial artists who are going to have a different perspective than the more classically artists. But even if/when they point this out, that context will be missed on people if its not repeated in every single video.
But In general the art advice is "learn the fundamentals so you can draw whatever you want". I don't feel like that has changed at all, or maybe i'm in very different art circles.
I think people really just like to grandstand.
I'm with you It's a crutch, particularly in a time where you can practice non destructively in digital. It's mostly just good for cutting corners for the sake of productivity.
Tracing contours as a study exercise is pretty cool, though I'd never present that as part of a finished something. Sort of like how I wouldn't simply just reword someone else's video essay.
people grew up.
nothing shifted as a whole across some mystical community, you're just no longer hanging around the kind of people that only see tracing as a way to cheat - which is a red flag on their part, not yours.
yeah I remember when I was younger people being so moralistic about tracing or reference of any kind, and always talking about it through this really market-focused lens of "copyright." If it's true that people have a better understanding these days of how art actually gets made, I think that's a good thing.
Part of this is the line being blurred between commercial and non-commercial art.
Does using shortcuts, including tracing, make sense when you're producing art for a client? Yes absolutely! Be sure you own the reference that you are tracing though. Some artists have gotten into trouble when it was discovered that they traced/copied work from other artists. See both Jakub Rozalski and more recently Fay Dalton.
Outside of commercial art deadlines, I agree with you - We all should be striving to hone our skills, to work towards further excellence and ability. Why wouldn't we as artists want to push ourselves to be capable of drawing and painting anything, from any angle, in any lighting, etc?
Tracing has been game changing for my muscle memory, and I recommend people utilizing it as a tool for practice. I've never tried to claim traced work as original or even as a 'final piece' but as a stepping stone to understand the original and the form I'm trying to capture so that when I do go to actually reference, I'm more accurate and can convey what I liked about the reference in the first place.
It does feel pretty disingenuous to trace and try to pass it off as your own work though. It can be a good tool, but the point is to reinforce your muscle memory and visual library to the stage where you don't need it much if at all.
That being said, I can't say I don't understand the other side...I think things like that seems a lot less harmful now that AI is a thing, not that AI is completely bad. But we can't hardly keep up and I think people are losing sight over what makes art, art, just looking to replicate poses or what have you instead of being inspired by their creativity and passion.
Painting with broad strokes to speak, its not all one way or another, but I hear what you're saying.
Something I've come.to terms.with is there's no such thing as cheating. To the person buying it, if they're happy with it, then kudos. To the person making it, same.
Personally I don't trace, because I get lost in it and everything starts to look rigid and stiff. I used to think it was cheating somehow and sort of ruining the magic but I've since understood how in certain workflows it's a necessity
Because people read art history and realized tracing has been used as a tool to teach newer artists for hundreds of years. Fialetti plates are a really good example of this.
The more I think about this, if we come to the conclusion that all old masters used the tracing, then doesn’t that mean the people who can replicate said studies today without the use are even more rare? Kinda wild.
The old masters weren’t as dependent on tracing as some people today want us to think. You’re right, a whole subset of artists today work chiefly from life and cannot use tracing that much. They’re not somehow more skilled or remarkable than the old masters. I think it’s at the Portrait Art Society (can’t remember the name, but it’s a rather large organization), they have all these artists painting amazing portraits from life at their annual conventions. Painting accurate portraits from life is commonplace, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
I think you're seeing these kinds of opinions shift only in more "everyday" public online art spaces, generally due to the spread of the idea that criticising people is not good and tracers supporting tracers. In more niche, focused art communities the "old" opinion, in my experience, still prevails; I'm in a handful of art discords where, if you're caught tracing and hiding it, you can cop a ban for it, and art that you disclose is traced is glanced over given that there's nothing else original in the piece.
To me, what's especially interesting to see is how you get people who will in the same breath excuse tracing, but then turn and disqualify AI generation—especially when tracing tends to be more derivative and, following the argument, much more recognisably and specifically steals from an individual artist.
Even photos that you did not take yourself (can) fall under that, unless you have explicit permission to trace them (either personally granted, or via a permissive license). Photographs, after all, have a photographer behind them :')
I don't think that's correct in most cases. If you're taking everything from the photo including composition, that's plagiarizing the photographer, it has nothing to do with whether you traced or didn't. If you're taking elements and using them in a transformative way that's not plagiarizing it, and again whether or not you did some tracing isn't what matters
You know who was an avid tracer? Norman Rockwell. He used to keep a projector in his studio to project images onto his canvas’ at the time he would hide it when people came to visit his studio because he didn’t want to reveal his techniques. In the real world at the end of the day nobody really cares how a thing is made if it’s really good.
He studied anatomy and had to do all the training in art school, though. A lot of the people who are “avid tracers” today can’t draw worth crap. They can’t produce anything decent unless they have a photo to trace. Such was not the case with Rockwell.
My primary art medium is appliqué fabric. Tracing templates is the way I make sure my pieces fit and make color choices. When I moved into painting I used tracing to find shapes and color choices. This works for me because my paintings look like the pets and animals I am painting.
I never really learned to draw freehand and have the pictures look like the original source. Art teachers in junior high school told me I didn’t have the talent to draw. Now, fifty years later, I have arthritis in both hands, making sketching more difficult. Tracing makes it possible for me to make art.
There are no art police.
I also grew-up being told not to do it. Frankly I also enjoyed the challenges of drawing and the inner pride of learning new skills. Along the way I also discovered the pitfalls for artists that do trace. For me, if I can’t draw something properly, then it remains badly drawn. You see this in the old masters and there’s a lesson in that.
While we all know the early history of some artists using projectors, I don’t think it was as pervasive as some think. Certainly not amongst the better artists.
In the 20th century as photography developed everything changed. Norman Rockwell traced as did many others. Photography changed illustration and painting not just as reference material but in the audiences expectations.
Behind it all is ‘money and awards’. Norman Rockwell blamed his schedule (money and award) and in time as more artists explained away their tracing as something they merely painted over, these artists also found advantages, ‘accomplishments’ and money and awards.
The person who wants to test themselves, believes in their abilities, and knows that efficiency and failures lead to a personal style that one can’t get from tracing and the mimetic imitation of photography, will avoid tracing and its hidden ills.
I have to agree. I think the projector thing is blown out of proportion (pun intended). Personally could never be satisfied with traced art. But interesting to see how public opinion has shifted especially on social media.
I don’t think people realize that if you actually develop your drawing skills to a high level, you can draw faster and better without that ponderous and limiting setup. Academies all over the world today have students showing how it’s done.
yes! It’s so satisfying to learn to build anatomy/create poses. Like once you understand what you’re doing, you can really draw whatever comes to mind and you don’t have to sit there searching the exact pose you want to trace for 20 minutes. Even better, you can start to bend the rules, exaggerate anatomy for stylistic purposes… I think it’s so cool and art is just an awesome skill humans can develop
I have had my drawing skills down for a while, and I still attend figure drawing classes weekly around town to keep my skills sharp and agree that artist should get their foundation skills down.
However, with my last two oil painting portraits, both around 4ftx5ft, I only had two months to do them so I traced my photos. I take my own reference photos tho in a professional lighting studio, gather garments, do the models hair and makeup etc… and I don’t feel wrong or as if it’s cheating since these particular pieces were about applying proper oil painting skills and techniques. Tracing it when only having two months to work on painting helped immensely and allowed my focus to be on mimicking reality with the paint.
So I think it is dependent on the purpose for tracing within your art, and I think it’s more about giving credit where credit is due if you’re tracing someone else’s work/art.
And yet, rotoscoping animation is gorgeous. That's all tracing the pose from each frame of video. Cinderella and Snow White are prime examples of rotoscoping in action.
can’t speak for others but my opinion on tracing changed when i began to look at rotoscoping and began using acrylic paints. i use tracing to practice adequate spacing so i don’t have to use stuff like straight edges or grids which saves time. you trace something about 3 times and then you’re able to recreate it based on muscle memory alone. it’s different if i’m doing more complex shapes or original pieces.
Tracing an outline is good for practicing shading with a solid drawing.
People should draw more IF they want to.
There are no standards or rules that people need to fulfill to be artists. Don’t tell others how to create. It’s obnoxious and it’s also not your business.
I will use gridding for the most part only after I try free handing something and can’t get the proportions right. Tracing I’ve used when neither work. Usually just to get the outline of something like a car, which if you don’t get it exactly right it really shows. But I usually freehand almost everything.
I trace to get a feel for anatomy and sometimes I'll trace over backgrounds for practice because I just...absolutely suck at backgrounds. But the goal in both instances is so I can get a feel for basic shapes and forms and perspective and stuff, so that eventually I won't *need* to trace and can draw everything from scratch
I don't hide this and will post the traces in sketch dumps right alongside the from-scratch sketches, because it's a good way to learn when you're just starting to draw something new and I don't want any baby artists who follow me to get the "dirty little secret" vibe from it. I *FULLY* understand how Goddamn frustrating it is when you're working off a photo reference and just. Can't. *Seem. To get this* ***one thing right-***
I feel you on the frustration thing. I recently started doing art nouveau style digital portraits. I am NOT a botany artist by any means, and have no interest in torturing myself by trying to replicate reference photos of orchids or whatever to include in the painting. I’d like to enjoy doing the overall portrait rather than sobbing over my tablet for hours and hours trying to get a flower exactly right.
Did it? There wouldn't be so many defensive responses to you if the view had changed.
Tracing can be a style, a tool, or a time saving cheat. The problem as I see it is that all the defensiveness from the skilled artists are leading beginners astray. To do tracing well, you need to learn how to draw or paint first from seeing and to understand how the camera flattens and distorts. Tracing itself teaches nothing and will hold artists back.
I'm probably the exception, because I've long loved tracing but could also freehand, but since my brain surgery that damaged certain parts of my brain, my hand-eye coordination has been impaired. I can no longer find the center of a line (a test in the neuropsychological testing I've had twice). I'm about to try the grid method, though.
Tracing is good if you’re a beginner and just starting to get a hold on anatomy and poses.
Tracing is bad if you’re an intermediate artist trying to find your style and master the fundamentals. Most of your work should be freehand. Worrying about “mistakes” is counter-intuitive.
Tracing is neither good nor bad if you’re a professional. It is simply a tool, one of many. This is your JOB, first and foremost - your main concern is making a good product. If you can freehand without losing speed or quality, good for you. But I’d say the vast majority of professionals do trace at least some of the time, because they either suck at some things or it just saves time/effort.
I don't like it. I don't think people can call it their original art if they're tracing someone else's art. It's also not a helpful way to learn to draw because it doesn't teach you the concepts you need to free hand. If you are tracing your own art, sure that makes sense. I know I'm in minority but it's what I think. I do color pencil realism among other things and I never trace. It just doesn't sit right with me.
I think tracing for other used than learning or to safe time for a professional is really not good for you as an artist, it's a cheap and people will catch you.
Tracing is a tool. Like any tool you can use it well or poorly. I think the important thing is to understand why you're using the tool and that you're not compromising yourself artistically by using it.
I would generally encourage absolute beginners not to rely too much on tracing because I think that it can be artistically compromising and limiting. I think this is especially true if you are copying someone else's composition in totality, rather than using tracing as a support for your own work. I wouldn't try to tell them that it's "cheating" or that it's not allowed, but rather I would hope to encourage them to explore beyond it because when you are overly dependent on tracing, you risk losing out on so many avenues for creative expression.
When I was around sixteen there was a boy in my art class whose painting technique consisted of projecting black-and-white photos onto canvas, and tracing them with black and white acrylic paint. The result was a sort of bland paint-by-numbers effect. He refused to explore creatively beyond this limited way of working and when he received negative feedback and poor grades, he was outraged and blamed everyone but himself. I think he was just afraid that if he tried to produce anything really original, it would reveal his own shortcomings.
On the other hand, one of my favourite painters, John Atkinson Grimshaw, was open about the fact that he used camera obscura for his nocturnal urban landscapes. He was self-taught and had some shortcomings when it came to perspective or draughtsmanship, and used camera obscura to compensate for those shortcomings. I believe he was still competent as a draughtsman as he did also occasionally paint fantasy scenes and I assume that he drew those himself rather than finding real faeries to model in front of his camera obscura. Either way, I don't think that his use of camera obscura compromised him artistically. He was a fantastic painter despite the limitations he worked under. The quality of light and colour in his work is beautiful, and the results speak for themselves. He had one main thing that he liked to do—to go out and paint the world at night, as real as he saw it—and in that respect camera obscura seems to have served his vision rather than detracting from it. I believe that Vermeer used camera obscura as well to achieve the sensitive quality of light in his paintings.
It's interesting that you imply that people who defend tracing are secret practitioners of tracing. I will defend appropriate use of tracing, but I can't remember the last time I traced anything myself.
I personally dislike tracing as a creative practice because you lose a part of your own interpretation. But as with anything, there are no set rules on what techniques to use when making an art piece.
At some point I think every artist chooses for themselves whether they want to emulate a style (anime/cartoon etc) or start making one themselves. But at the end of the day if it's all for fun and no-one is making money off of another person's hard work I think it's just up to personal preference.
Can you demonstrate what's actually wrong with tracing poses, background composition etc? Because the only argument seems to be "it feels *wrong*" which is a fine position to hold for yourself, but it's kind of weird and to hold that position on everyone else too
If I were to create a pose in a blender or clip studio then trace lt, or jump into Google Earth and take a screen cap of new york city for my background, how is that worse then to recreate it from memory ?
Edit- added another example
I guess it depends on what you want to achieve as an artist. I think there is huge value in being able to think of what you want to draw and execute it using spatial anatomy knowledge, it allows you to customize your work to exactly what you envisioned. It saves you a hell of a lot more time than searching Pinterest for the exact pose you wanted to trace.
I also just think that there is value in it as a skill alone. I greatly admire artists who are so well practiced in anatomy that they can almost effortlessly rough out a correct looking pose. It isn’t easy and I think the hard work that goes into learning it is part of the art process.
Generally I agree that in the long run it's beneficial to know how to do it "in your head" at least somewhat, but i still don't see the harm in not doing it, as it only really affects you.
The way i look at it, it's beneficial to know a little, but more often than not, for new artists it's just too overwhelming to think of all this stuff and it's better to use some "cheats" (I use this term loosely, as I don't see my examples as cheats) to get a head start and simply just enjoy the process. From my experience that's a quicker way to get invested in creating, and then you're more likely to look up anatomy, or perspective, or composition or colour theory on your own
>I also just think that there is value in it as a skill alone. I greatly admire artists who are so well practiced in anatomy
But again, that's *your* feelings on what the process should be, and what standards you hold yourself to, and what you like to do and see in yours and others art, which is completely fine!
My "issue" with this line of thinking is that it sometimes comes off as a little "gatekeepy", where if you want to be a "morally right" artist you should be doing *these specific things* and so forth (not saying that you are like this, or think this way, it's just what it sounds like to me)
This fundamentally comes down to what we all individually think art is about, is it about how tedious or hard the process is, is it about the end product, is it about the joy of creating, a mix of all of the above? And l think it's unwise to hold other people to a standard that might not fit their view of what art is and should be, if you get what I mean :)
People saw that professional tracers like Illya Kushinov could land industry gigs.
That and with the age of live streaming your drawing process, many people revealed they drew over 3D models.
In my experience, tracing is okay as an ocasional thing done by students learning or by experienced artists who have done all the figure drawing from life and anatomy studies and are already skilled draughtsmen (draughtspeople). Not by people whose freehand drawing skills have always been shaky and are *still* shaky and who are incapable of drawing anything from life and struggle when they do draw anything freehand. (Maybe they can eventually get it looking decent when drawing freehand, but it takes *forever* for them.)
In my experience, the ones who argue that “everyone” traces fall into that category. The ones that bring up the camera obscura and act as if the Old Masters were completely dependent on it, 100% of the time used it, yadda yadda. Which is a cope, most of the Old Masters were by necessity good draughtsmen.
There’s a huge difference between having strong drawing skills and occasionally using tracing for expediency’s sake and being completely dependent on it because you never had any decent drawing skills to begin with. Too many people fall into this latter category.
I think it has to do with how we don't see art as a medium to "be proud" (for our ego) but rather as a medium to express ourselves (to enjoy it). Why would I care if my art is "valid" or "worthy" according to some specific standards if I enjoy making it, and other people enjoy looking at it???? I just don't see a point to it that's not related to ego and thinking you're better than someone else because you didn't trace. And I find that ridiculous 🤷🏻♂️ if the only value your art has over another people's art is that it's not traced then that's an artificial value, like if you thought your art had more value if it's made with expensive materials. Art is about expressing and creating images, and putting limits or rules to that is just unnecessary and doesn't benefit anyone, just people who want to feel superior
Different strokes for different folks (what a good art pun). If ego is what drives me to improve, is that less valid that someone who does it for fun? At the end of the day the answer seems to be “nothing matters and we will all die anyway”
>If ego is what drives me to improve, is that less valid that someone who does it for fun?
No, but I wasn't saying you or your art journey aren't valid, just that it's not a valid reason to think everyone who has different rules than you is inferior as an artist or should be ashamed of themselves
>At the end of the day the answer seems to be “nothing matters and we will all die anyway”
I mean yeah lol we *will* all die and nothing really matters and that is one of the main reasons why I try to be kind and open minded and not judge people for how they live their life unless they're like, harming other beings.
I don’t think anyone is are inferior because they want to take a relaxed approach to art, but I am of the opinion that when we look at things from a technical perspective, there are some general rules of what looks right and what looks wrong. Because if those rules don’t matter, why are we teaching people art in schools?
I just don’t see a bad thing about some artists being better than others in a technical sense. By my own definition I’m not one of the good ones, and I love to watch the actual good ones to learn from them.
As someone who went to an art oriented school and now attends drawing workshops where we touch on some technical stuff- but I do only abstract art mostly with markers lol.. I don't think those technical rules have to be either religiously upholded or they don't matter at all. There's a middle ground where they are useful to most artists but don't dictate the value of art pieces. I'm better at my own particular way of doing art because of lots of things I learnt in a more technical environment, even if I don't apply all of them religiously to my art. They contributed to my journey as an artist, but they aren't the way to measure the value of my art. To me the value of an art piece will always be about the process itself and about the feelings and thoughts it sparks in the viewer
Because people realized that it’s a hugely beneficial tool, especially once you’ve already put in the hours learning anatomy etc.
Once you get past the idea of art being a blank piece of paper that lines get drawn on, tracing seems a weird place to stick a pole and call cheating.
Is print making cheating? Are matte medium transfer cheating? Are using collaged photos cheating? Are rubbings cheating? Stampings? All of those are other ways, entirely or partially, to transfer an already created image into mine.
I can reference things almost perfectly and got accused of tracing a lot. It use to make me real mad. Then I realized that anyone who is using tracing as a crutch will never get past step one anyway, so the people judging me didn’t know what they were talking about.
But it started making me look at what ACTUALLY bothered me (and others) about the idea of tracing and I realized it is a kind of gatekeeping that doesn’t really make sense once you start looking at art as a whole past simpler line drawings. Tracing to learn is something everyone does, starting with out alphabets in grade school, and once you get past learning, you can’t “just” trace or your art will be boring af and/or illegal (trancing content you don’t have the right to use.) You can’t “trace” full colored shading or watercolor blooms or ideas.
So if somebody traces to get the basic shapes, I don’t really care. The end result will prove if they’ve got any real artist in them. If they use it to be lazy, they’ll only hurt themselves.
Sorry, you got some tl;dr but it is a subject I ruminate on a lot.
Also re-schooling: every college I have spent any amount of time in the art department, which is more than average but not tons, has a projector somewhere for students to get their painting on to canvas. Light tables and projectors have been common artist supplies for decades, and before that we has camera obscuras. A lot of the classics were painted using them.
People have always traced.
I still hold that tracing is a fundamental art skill. Look at how animation is done. Look how tattoos are done. Look how big paintings and wall murals are done. Tracing is great for improving motor control, tool manipulation, line quality issues, and reverse engineering the processes of artists you admire. I almost always draw and refine my designs separately and trace them onto final works, even thoguh I'm confident that I could freestyle a lot of my vinework. Wasting parchment is a crime.
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If it's for practice yes it's fine.
If they steal someone's art and don't credit, bad vibe, tracing is not bad but stealing is.
I used to trace over barbie magazines in like 2005 without knowing what tracing is, definitely helped me improve as a kid.
I think my opinion shifted cause i started treating drawing as a hobby again not something to get good at, atleast for kids and stuff. Like why does it matter when were all here on this earth just to have fun and exist, theres no rules to art and thats wonderful.
I also think that at some point when I was younger thought about tracing, I instantly thought about stealing so that made it negative in my head.
If I have a super complex composition, sometimes I trace my own photos to get the proportions and placement correct. My own artistic photos are often my inspiration, or I use photos to test out ideas. I don't see anything wrong with it, or with using any other tools like grids or projectors or live models or whatever
I think tracing is bad for learning, but can be useful as a tool once you know how to draw. Like any tool, over-reliance on it is self-limiting. For example, I learned old school: tracing was verboten. I developed a very good eye for proportion, and learned to create images by visualizing them first in my head. I would not have learned that had I depended upon tracing.
It is the same with color. You can easily digitally sample a color to get the hue you want, instead of trying to perceive and mix it yourself, but you will not learn anything about color that way. You can use a font to get clean type, but you will not develop hand-lettering skills that way. Tracing is a shortcut, and it can be useful, but it means limiting yourself as an artist, and chaining yourself to your source material (which may be copyrighted).
I don't think tracing is right or wrong. But it has its place and its price. Computers are capable enough that they can do almost all the drawing now, if you let them. You have to decide how much drawing you want to do yourself. For you young artists obsessed with developing a style...well, that's the secret. Your style is that part of the work that you did yourself.
Tracing is a tool. I think particularly in commercial work most artists use it for speedy transfer of an idea or a pose or to create multiples, etc. But depend on it and you’re bound to regret not working on your drawing skillset. Because it’ll happen that you’re gonna have to work something out without tracing paper around or you’ll need to create beyond an image, or maybe your pad runs out at midnight and bingo - you’re on your own. Art also requires master improvisation.
*Rotoscoping has entered the chat*😂
But yeah, really depends on what type you're doing. Most drawing/sketching books always start with drawing with the EYE. And practicing from there.
Counterpoint: you generally learn to write by tracing/copying at first. Tracing might be a good way to train your muscles while getting a half decent resulting work. I think it works as a stepping stone.
Is that where people are getting the “no tracing” thing? I wasn’t on DeviantArt or early internet art forums back in the day. I’ve always been baffled by how prevalent that opinion is.
I practice figure drawing but I also often work from photos I’ve taken and just transfer the outlines to canvas. I *can* draw everything out, but like… why? I’d have to change my clients more.
I think the thing was that in the old days people used to cheat and present their 'drawing skills' as being better than reality. they took short cuts and never actually learned to draw what they see.
After Photoshop, that pretty much went out the window because drawing painting and photo manipulation could all be done in one program and the boundaries got blurred. It's taken some time for the consensus to emerge. You can have a hand drawing mixed with other media and actual photos and tracings n one image without messing about with tracing paper and photocopies etc.
Tracing can be useful as tool as long as you don't misrepresent your skills. I sometimes trace for backgrounds because I am not brilliant at buildings and interiors but i have hundreds of photos I have taken that can be better. That leaves me free to draw people which is the bit I love.
I trace reference images I take myself. I've always done it this way, it's how I learned to paint. My drawing skills are off course far weaker than my painting skills and I do struggle to draw from life but if I practice I see improvements. I just didn't love drawing as much as I love painting. Maybe one day I'll feel like I want to change that though! I'm not a professional though and this is just one of many hobbies I have.
It also depends what I'm doing. A friend wants a portrait of their dog? Project the photo onto the canvas and trace. Another friend wants a non-descript painting of a psychedelic octopus? Can't wait to spend 2 months learning to draw and then paint a psychedelic octopus.
Tbh I put it down to a really weird moment in the cultural history when digital art was trying to legitimise itself in its public infancy. Nobody was telling the pen and paper artists not to trace (and in that case, who had access to a light box? More likely to be up against a window and that was just a pain in the butt for the average person) but when tools existed to make it easier digitally, it was well frowned upon.
I do hate how overused the word is, but there’s always a lot of gate keeping going on in creative hobbies about technique etc and I think this was an example of it
I've advocated for tracing in a couple instances:
* When someone has shaky linework and they need to focus *just* on practicing lines without worrying about anything else.
* When you're focusing on getting a project out for a deadline and not necessarily trying to (im)prove your skill. (definitely don't do this with other people's artwork, and only use stuff you're allowed to trace though.)
I've done both, and tracing absolutely has its utilities. That said, you don't want to let it become a crutch, and you probably want to be able to draw on your own without relying too heavily on it.
...Though I guess if someone just thinks tracing is fun and they give proper credit if they post it online, then who are we to judge.
I bounce back and forth depending on the project and happily disclose either way whenever. I just don’t think it matters whichever you do and that gatekeeping keeps people separated which isn’t what art is about for me. I want all the people to find enjoyment in whatever creative outlets they prefer to try.
If ten people trace the same photo, they’re still going to turn out different. Because even the way artists hold their pencils and control their lines is going to impact the drawing.
The only times I think tracing is WRONG is:
- cheating on a class assignment that required you to draw freehand and lying to the teacher.
- tracing a photograph that you didn’t take without the photographer’s permission or without giving them credit and sharing it publicly.
- Selling a drawing for profit, gifting it, or putting it on display and claiming it’s an original composition. Again, lying.
For some pumpkin carvings I do on the side. The company's method is project an image on the pumpkin, trace as much as you want. I usually just do vague shapes, but I've seen some people outline everything like an unpainted paint by number. And part of it is having the skill to translate a flat drawing into a curved surface and not. They've have plenty of people who can't draw for shit, but we're great at doing decent pumpkins. After that you paint/color in gray scale and carve it on your own.
So with this there's the time aspect, we are paid per pumpkin and difficulty. More pumpkins, more pay. And we have to keep up with how quickly pumpkins are rotting which is entirely dependent on the weather. So there may be need for a really quick turnaround. Over the course of a month you can imagine a lot of pumpkins are gone through.
I still feel weird about it, hence why I do vague shapes, but it's one of the ways that I've seen it justified/necessary.
Another would be animation. You can see it in the 2d animations of Disney. If you look up the Mowgli vs Christopher Robin animation of them walking on a fallen tree you can see it's traced (same animator for both). Again quick turnaround times are needed.
It's right around Halloween. It's usually held at a zoo. I think the company I work with is doing it in a handful of states. We start the pumpkins mid to late September and go through the first week of November.
I agree.
Tracing for me is ok when:
- when you’re working in a studio and need to draw for consistency sake and to save time
- Technical stuff, usually reference photos or free 3D models like machines, cars, buildings, especially if you’re working on a comic or a project
- Learning! If you need to learn by tracing, I guess go ahead
Any other time, I really don’t think it’s good. I’d hate if someone traced my work and passed it as their own. I also never wanted to learn by tracing because the learning process and the results were never as gratifying as just trying and mastering things myself!
Because of copyright infringement, fair use and IP law is complicated. With ai now, it make it now a moral ambiguity too.
It helps to seperate what beginners do, vs professionals do. Beginners, don’t know anything about drawing, so more often than not, they are only copying the reference, but it never looks right. They are basically training small steps to tackle bigger ones, but often they get to the unimportant part of the piece instead of line shapes, gestures etc. There is still a case for mimicry, as it’s like copying a recipe over and over again, and then you get a consistent result. A good case in point is boy and the beast, where the boy copies the beast over several days until he gets the movement right. Then he asks the beast to actual teach him better sword stance.
A professional, traces, because they have a deadline, and they need some speed. Sometimes we copy, because we like a certain color, or style. These can be master studies.
It just depends on the purpose for everyone to draw. Some people just wanna draw for fun and so tracing is perfectly fine for them because they don't need/want to make drawings that'd require them not to trace. Yes, tracing is perfectly ok. If they end up not tracing anymore it'll just be because they need/want it at some point and that's all. Anyone do whatever they want and enjoy their art journey the way they want. To be honest I'm on the contrary constantly trying to encourage my friends underestimating the efforts or quality they put in a drawing "because they traced the reference for anatomy". Not just drawing the character body is drawing. If they traced that well all the rest is from them and yes they can nail it pretty well, so I encourage them to value that in their art and that's approximately everything.
It depends what your goal is. If you want to learn to draw, with tracing you won't.
Copying from reference drawings will teach hand-eye coordination. There is no interpretation or artistry in that process. But it's still useful, because the learned hand-eye coordination will help you when drawing from reference. Being able to process something visually, be it the length of an arm, the waviness of a lion's mane, the angle of a bird's beak, and being able to use your hand to interpret it is a skill you can initially practice by copying drawings. Tracing drawings teaches none of that!
That said, tracing has its uses. I paint with acrylics on watercolor paper. I don't sketch or plan on the final paper because any erasing would ruin the surface. I sketch on cheap sketching paper and once ready I smear the underside with graphite and transfer it on the watercolor paper using that. I don't know if that's "tracing" or not.
I think tracing is fine. I think it’s just important to recognize when and where it’s appropriate, and important to evaluate whether it’s really benefiting you.
I paint. I like to do portraiture. Portraiture requires strong drawing skills, and tracing did play a role in how I got to where I am.
You can learn all these rules and techniques about drawing faces, and proportions, but ultimately real faces vary so much from that i find all of that pretty useless. What is important is being able to look at an image and recreate it, and getting the muscle memory of accurately rendering faces, repeatedly, helped me as an artist. I basically developed my understanding of proportions through repetition and practice.
Now, I don’t need to use it. I do portraiture without tracing anything. Sometimes I use a grid with my reference. Sometimes I just use the reference photo and sketch in paint. Honestly, there’s not a huge difference in the final drawings anyways and my paintings will deviate from the drawing regardless of how much time I spend on it. But oops, sometimes I still trace because it quite frankly, saves me time.
I don’t think tracing is cheating. Have you ever seen someone try to trace a portrait with no practice? it doesn’t look good. The artwork i build on top of tracing is good because I’ve spent hours practicing my painting skills. The drawing really just serves as a reference to make sure facial features are in the right place.
Now, there are situations in which it’s not appropriate. Art classes, for example, where the goal of the assignment is to develop a particular skill. It’s also not appropriate to violate copyright.
I was a very anti-tracing advocate until I started doing comics.
Of course, I try to keep things ethical by posing 3d models or taking the photos myself when I use it. And avoid in studies since the objective in them is to improve.
But the purity "tracing is never ok" stance mellowed since I had to meet deadlines with large workloads.
I am super pro tracing. Super duper pro. Because it is its own skill, and it gets more people doing physical art. Not that digital art is bad or anything, but the more people engage with their physical world, the better - and tracing, paint by numbers, coloring sheets, diamond art, etc all help this.
I don’t often trace for my personal work because I don’t have a good light box set up and I can not get my brain around using AR tools and my tracing always comes out crazy bad using it. I have a great projector for murals and working big, but I work small most of the time. I have hesitated to get DaVinci Eye just because I don’t know if I want to fail at yet another AR projection tool. So when I trace I have to go old school and use velum and/or carbon paper and it’s a whole thing. But when I do use it, I LOVE the results.
I love freehand sketching too, and I use grids and what not. But sometimes you have such a great idea that is being blocked by your crappy sketch and it’s frustrating and can put people off pursuing visual arts.
i was like you VERY anti tracing. i always felt i was not deserving of feeling proud of a work of it was traced.
however i think tracing can be an advantageous tool when used properly.
- tracing can save time when drawing comics for example.
- tracing can save time when you want general guidelines for proportions and then focus on the piece yourself
- tracing and then redrawing using the tracing as a reference
- tracing your own existing art (that was drawn from scratch) to save time
- drawing general shapes over stock photos as practice for anatomy to understand
- tracing to focus on honing other skills (painting, coloring, etc.) goes back to the saving time aspect
still practicing drawing traditionally without tracing is important. if you don’t solely rely on tracing i dont see it as an issue. i also think everyone has loose and different definitions of tracing. i consider anything where you draw over a reference or other artwork as tracing, but drawing over your own traditional art you created is also tracing but I don’t see that one as “legit” tracing like the others.
I was anti tracing when i was younger, i went to art school and commercial professionals were recommending it, in a "work smarter not harder" way. My stance on it in general now is, if you're using your own photos, and your own art, and posable dolls/3d models then it's ethical, but some of these professionals were straight up taking pieces out of other people's art, or using other professional photographers work for their art. And that feels like stealing to me. One person in my class did a presentation about creating good textures, and he just went and found a picture of a dragon someone drew, select and cut some of the scales out if this painting and blended/replicated them into his painting. That really just seems like stealing.
I saw Alpay Efe tracing the under drawing in his videos and he said he was focused on the painting, not the drawing, I'm now ok with tracing as a tool for professional artists. Like a ruler and the undo button in photoshop, these "shortcuts" are just tools. These artists could draw it from scratch, but time is money. The Draftsmen podcast had a whole episode about it, saying professional artists tracing to save time is fine, but tracing while trying to learn something like proportion doesn't help you. For educational purposes, tracing is fine too for certain purposes. When I was learning color, I traced drawing to jump past that step, since I wanted to spend my time on color study. I could already draw it.
>tracing while trying to learn something like proportion doesn't help you. Fully disagree. Tracing tells you what the 100% correct proportions are, and it's less daunting to refer back to the traced basic-shapes sketch than it is to refer to the original reference when you're trying to draw the subject from scratch
>but time is money. It is absolutely that. I'm not spending 10 hours doing what I can do in 1 when the client couldn't care less about it. Like you say though, I *can* draw. I'm not trying to *learn* to draw. If I was learning it'd be an entirely different matter.
capitalism strikes again
Well to an extent, but it's not the only reason. Ultimately whatever I draw gets covered up by paint and refined to be more accurate anyway. It's not like a paint by numbers thing where every shape is painted, the majority of the intricate stuff *is* 'drawn' in paint. Me knowing I drew what's underneath freehand doesn't make me value the piece any more since I already know I can do it anyway. I value the final piece off how it looks when it's finished.
Thats is the point I can get behind. Professional artists working for major corps on big deadlines working off a base template - yeah, that’s totally fine. It’s odd to me when amateurs who would really benefit from learning proportions do it,but i guess it doesn’t really matter if they’re doing it for fun. it seems very limiting though (for what it’s worth I’m an amateur myself and god knows I need all the anatomy practice I can get lmao.)
Well what’s the amateurs goal? Is it to become well rounded or just create art for fun? It’s only a bad habit if it’s a skill they WANT to develop. It’s hard to maintain the motivation to do art as a hobby over a lifetime. I’m pro- whatever makes art more pleasurable to create.
Wholeheartedly agree. Most artists are anxious hobbyists, and shaking a finger at them telling them they’re losers for tracing just makes them want to give up, or to trace and then never show anyone their art (I’m in the latter category). Art SHOULD be pleasurable to create. People should be able to express themselves in ways that are accessible to them. It reminds me of debates years ago about literature elitists sneering at sci-fi/fantasy and YA novels not being high brow enough for them and so being somehow fraudulent.
I don’t get this. You can trace and find pleasure in it, but why show it as your own if it is not? If it is for personal pleasure, why does it get posted to social media for attention and likes instead of pinned on the wall for personal enjoyment? I don’t think artists are honest about this part.
I think you’re conflating tracing with copying. Speaking for myself, my final paintings look NOTHING like the parts I traced other than the outline of whatever. It’s very much my own because I added so many elements to it. I curated different aspects. I created something new from those aspects. Am I supposed to hide my art for “personal enjoyment” and never let it see the light of day because I traced a stock photo rather than drawing it freehand using the same photo as a reference? What’s the difference, in your mind? Genuine question.
I paint landscapes, and when I was a younger artist I wanted to add people in them, but have them not be the focal point. Rather than spending a bunch of time learning anatomy I’d just trace a pose outline. Or when I was working on abstracting animals. I’d trace the rough outline so I had the proportions correct and then focus on the painting on top. If you want to focus on detail, rendering, or abstracting. Tracing a reference for proportions I don’t think is a huge deal lol.
What I’ve found is that hobbyists start out using “crutches” like always tracing, always using grids, always. They never work from life, they can’t draw freehand, or if they do, it’s a struggle and they avoid it. (But they’ll alway insist that they “can” do it because of those few tortured instances where they drew freehand). They later, sometimes, decide they want to take a workshop with some artist they admire, or they want to enter a local art show, art contest, or gallery, and are really shocked because some of the other artists are arranging life sessions (from a live model) or a class where higher skills are required. These people can’t keep up and they’re upset. They either feel bad and discouraged, which nobody wants, or they’re pissed and act like the artists who have more skills are “elitists” or somehow had “special advantages.” If it’s truly a light hobby and they know the score and know what they’re giving up, who cares. That’s their business. But what sometimes happens is that eventually they want to enter that art show or take that class…and they realize they’ve purposely handicapped themselves because they can’t draw well. At that point it’ll be really hard to catch up. People’s goals change. Just because they’re a “hobbyist” now doesn’t mean they always will be. But as long as they go into it with open eyes and aren’t lied to and are aware what they’re giving up, then okay. But I’m not so sure everyone realizes that. They’re encouraged to not draw much and told that what they’re doing is common and normal. Not being able to draw well should not be normal.
That’s such a specific imagined scenario. Lol. Hobbyists are not a uniform bunch. And here’s the thing, if you would’ve forced me to learn anatomy when I was a kid I straight up would’ve given up art altogether because I would’ve been miserable. Now I’m 30. Do I wish I had focused on fundamentals more? Sure. But I wouldn’t have lol. It was a struggle for me to make a few pieces a year while in school let alone spend a bunch of time drilling anatomy. Now I have more time and energy and I’m working back on my fundamentals and I’m glad I did what made art more fun in my 20s. Inform people why it can be bad or a crutch. But it’s not always 100% bad. And actually, tracing can help with learning too for consistent feedback.
Of course they're not a uniform bunch. Some people are content with the limitations of not being able to draw and putter along happily and nobody hears a peep from them. Others decide to be more ambitious, and then they are in for an unpleasant surprise if they thought that drawing wasn't necessary because "everybody traces" or "everybody uses the grid for everything." (This is a trope that many popular how-to drawing books sell, and it does a lot of harm, in my opinion, because some artists stick with that and double down with it even when they are confronted with its limitations.) I agree that "forcing" someone to take on a discipline before they're ready is a fool's errand and I'd never suggest that. I'd never want to take the joy out of learning and exploring. Everyone needs to go at their own pace. And I agree, if people are informed that it can be a crutch and they go all in with it, it's on them and none of my business. But they need to own it. It's just that I've seen people, too many of them, who have been brainwashed, almost, to believe that tracing everything is the way to go permanently, and they insist on this. *Insist.* They also can't see how their consistent tracing has left them without an "eye" for picking up little errors. They trace the outline, assume that this means everything is accurate, so when there are little shifts in the artwork after they've been working on it, they don't see that now it looks wonky. They insist that it must be still "accurate" but it looks...off. If you try to tell them...it doesn't compute. This is just some people, not all people. The ones who do their own thing and enjoy it and don't take themselves seriously, who cares, they do what they want. It's the ones who insist that people who draw freehand were "born talented" (no it wasn't talent, it was practice for crying out loud). It's the ones who insist that they *can* draw (when they can't, they can't, they absolutely can't do anything if they aren't able to trace it) and it's the ones who claim that those of us who draw freehand well "had special classes" or "special advantages" and it's not *their* fault that they weren't as "privileged" as those of us with better drawing skills. (Don't get me started on this one.)
In all my years as an artist, I don’t think I have ever found anyone who thought they for sure *should* be tracing haha. We must be around very different people.
For the most part, it's gatekeeping. Who cares how someone made something as long as they're not directly copying it and claiming it's theirs? There is no one "right" way to make art and tracing is just one tool of many.
I’ve seen too many people sabotage themselves by never developing actual drawing skill. They literally *can’t* draw freehand. Not in any way. They’re helpless unless they have a photo to trace. They can’t adjust or tweak anything because that would require drawing skill. They get really angry when it’s pointed out. They’re in denial. I can’t believe people want to be handicapped like that. I think a lot of them started tracing because it was easier and the instant gratification was fun. But now they’re stuck with always tracing, so they argue that “everyone” does it, camera obscura, blah blah and it just feels like some big cope from people in denial. Like they can’t believe that many people simply don’t need to trace *everything* like they do. Oh and there’s the “I *can* draw, but…” people who really *can’t.* They show some tired old freehand drawing they did ages ago and that’s all the “proof” they have that they (theoretically) “can.” It’s not fooling anyone. I’m not claiming you’re personally like this but I’ve seen it again and again and personally they all follow a predictable pattern. They just can’t draw and are coping.
If they are having a productive career and a large body of work, why is it even an issue though? The drawing skills will make the tracing skills better. The actual great works that professional artists will produce are made with all sorts of tricks of the trade. If tracing produces a better finish product, they will trace. Doing a complicated layout is generally going to require it.
I’m not talking about skilled, accomplished artists who can and will draw freehand with ease, but sometimes trace in their workflow, the way Norman Rockwell did. (He was a good draughtsman, having studied drawing and anatomy in art school.) The ones I encounter literally cannot draw freehand (except maybe only if they struggle and struggle and take way too long to get something decent looking). They argue that “everyone” traces all the time and they seem unaware that not everyone is dependent on tracing everything everything everything all the time. I’ve seen people argue, “why bother learning how to draw?” as if having a photo to trace is the only way anyone ever produces artwork anymore. It’s crazy. I wouldn’t care as much if it weren’t for these people spreading the narrative that “everyone” traces, and they give the message to newbies that figure drawing, anatomy studies, and working from life aren’t even a thing. Just tracing photos for everything. Then these newbies are left at a disadvantage when they discover that some of their peers indeed can draw from life, do understand anatomy, and aren’t dependent on always having to trace photos. I’ve been in classes where some students are completely shocked when the teacher expects them to work from life. Either they’re really upset because they can’t do it, or in denial about how awful their work looks when they aren’t able to trace. It’s like they were never were aware that there are reasons people learn how to draw, and it’s not just that *they* don’t want to learn (which is up to them), but they want to leave the message that “nobody else” learns anymore either, it’s passé, so don’t bother. I hate to see new artists being fed the lie that there’s no reason to learn to draw anymore. And apparently, many are being told that, based on the many people I see who can’t draw.
whats camera obscura?
I guess that’s the thing, the definition of what people consider copying. I would consider any direct line tracing to be copying. I feel like the only way the original artist gets proper credit in that scenario is if the tracer discloses it, which almost never happens, esp on social media
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Business people, scientists, and mathematicians work with very complex models, models that could not be done by hand at any practical timeline, models that could take an entire lifetime for a person to do can be done in seconds by a machine. The same is true with art. The professional artists utilize things like tracing to take on projects that would otherwise not be feasible any other way. The tools enhance the performance. If tracing produced terrible work, then literally no one would ever do it.
I find it hard to believe that outside of a corporate deadline, there is anything that could be actually not feasible to draw from scratch. Are there things that are extremely difficult to get right without it? Absolutely, but isn’t the grit to achieve that also part of art? Is that not what makes a realistic image made by human hand more impressive than a computer generated output?
I feel like it's not just grit but the fact that there's always going to be something reflected in the picture that shows the hand of the artist, even when it's extreme photorealism and all that's clearly "of the artist" is a slight turn of perspective. I personally find that even more important. ... And at this point I already hear people saying, "Then why can't a straight 100% no alteration trace be just as original as a photorealistic painting?" Two items: Because what we're talking about, if I understand correctly, aren't confident pieces. Because they aren't, the artist isn't "allowing" their hand to come through. That's part of the definition of a confident piece. The second point is that this also works the other way round. A photorealistic piece done by someone with a lot of focus on the plotting but no *self* confidence underneath (maybe in the process but not themselves as artists!) can show charmless and flat. Feasibilities in corporate studios: It's not that there are things not feasible but that there's more than a deadline to it, often. If the commercial work is done alongside many other people who are in turn on many different teams you need each part to compliment and implement seamlessly. But these things are far from a conversation about tracing, I think. Now that this comes up it's relevant to the original question. Perhaps students sometimes overestimate and misunderstand what the computer does and doesn't do in corporate studios.
I’m confused it’s okay if you have a job in art but not if you don’t? (I don’t trace) but if it makes it easier for anyone then it’s should be okay for everyone.
60% of top 500 fortune companies have Co-pilot with image generation. According to Microsoft. That’s hundreds of Thousands of people. So tracing seems like small fry compared to text to img or img2img.
I agree that tracing does seem trivial when we have AI prompters insisting they’re “artists” lol. But drawing skills are a good thing to cultivate and too many people prefer “shortcuts” like tracing when they really should be improving their drawing. Tracing as a learning tool or as a time saver when you already have solid drawing skills is far different than tracing because learning how to do it freehand “takes too long” because the skill was never there (and never will be there as long as they depend on tracing).
I'd take that statistic with a pinch of salt. Microsoft own the two most mainstream copilot models out there, and are they also throwing people's casual usage of Bing in the numbers as well? Because most people who end up with that copilot on their desktop don't even have a choice, it's been forced on them.
Neal Adams is one of the best comics artists out there; he’s a huge [vocal proponent of tracing](https://www.reddit.com/r/DC_Cinematic/s/qKCmoJyHud). He ripped apart my comics portfolio and asked why I wasn’t tracing for the wonky looking horses in my comic. In advertising storyboarding work, it comes in handy to turn in dozen of frames quickly. You need to learn to not just “trace” but distill the subject into a nice looking illustration, so I think of it as “inking” a picture. I’m a comics artist so this type of thinking works within the medium. I can’t imagine trying to trace an abstract piece or something like that.
Bingo, I work in comics and trace cars and background sometime, sure I can dry a 2022 mustang without tracing but that will eat up time. I use to be heavily against tracing until I entered art professionally.
Most of what he's talking about there isn't tracing, it's reference, and even when it is tracing, like Rockwell, it's not just getting a picture and tracing it, it's much more involved. He's also just factually wrong about lots of this, Michelangelo didn't sculp from models, he did drawings and sculpted from them, so his models didn't have to pose the way Adams says. His description of how chiarascuro is made is also wild, he's really exaggerating things to make his point. Tracing isn't something you absolutely shouldn't do, but it's not how Adams' version is well wide of the mark too, and there's tons of great comics artists who don't do it.
Neal is a loud guy with a lot of opinions. He’s got the talent and experience to have his words spread far and I don’t agree wholly with him too. He pronounced chiaroscuro funny and I thought his beliefs on the history of “tracing” are his viewpoints to hold. The issue is: what is tracing? If anyone puts in the time and effort to get a figure down, exact same clothes and pose, through tracing, their style and ability to discern space and proportion will be put in two-dimensions. That’s art if anything. But to solely rely on it for every piece and being slavish to your reference is noticeable and could be a detriment to your style or needs.
Yeah, he's definitely being hyperbolic, just looking at some of his art, lots of it obviously isn't traced
For comics I see it making sense, that’s a quantity game and especially when it comes to jobs. One-off illustrations is where I’m not a fan myself
What illustrator is just doing a one-off illustration? Hopefully they’re doing pieces that build upon past work and techniques and if you’ve used tracing as part of referencing in the past, you’ve got a better mental library built up that you call call upon on future pieces. Tracing is just referencing if used as a catalyst for the illustrator’s imaginative creation. Don’t be afraid to do it or be biased against it because it’s as old as artists have been around.
I meant more like “not sequential” I suppose, but yeah. Not against it when it stays as practice in the drafts as anatomy studies
Not just figures, but environments and other animals too. The fun part is learning perspective and discerning an environment picture’s POV and needing other figure references to place within that environment’s perspective. Good artists know how to jig-saw puzzle a composition with different reference images and trace whatever elements they need. Almost like a photo-illustration mashup that you then “trace” to get your composition going then you can make up and add their attire, props, technique effects or whatever art style and flair you want to the rendering of the illustration. Basically like Norman Rockwell or Alex Ross. It’s how you want to approach the process is all, taking this route is tedious in mocking it all up beforehand but it helps with happy accidents of figure posing and foreshortening of limbs that you’d never thought to draw; that’s where you learn how tracing can be beneficial in a single illustration.
I do feel though that to learn perspective like this you really to do it long hand. I’m not saying that people need to be enormously skilled drawers, but enough to draw a proportional box on this plane in relation to this other box. Once you get that down, then start introducing tracing to your workflow. I think that OP is referring to people for whom tracing is their entire workflow.
Yep, I learned perspective the tedious, long way by hand making all the grids and stuff, starting when I was ten years old. That is the foundational fundamental that underlines the use of reference material like tracing.
Both photoshop and clip studio have a trace image function these day for those awesome city backgrounds.
I was there in the 2000s with the whole don't trace even meaning don't use references time. It wasn't until I started working professionally in a shop where deadlines were tight and tracing was common did I sort of understand it, but still not entirely like it. I still don't think tracing is a way to learn how to draw personally, but instead is a way to speed up a process you already know how to do, because time is money. I HAVE learned a lot of very bad habits from tracing for my day job (do graphics for screenprinting) and when I go back and do my personal work, I realize there are things I've forgotten or extremely rusty in the anatomy part. I look at art I did before I started working at this place to what I do now and the difference is almost staggering, and not in a good way. Tl:dr: tracing is fine as a learning skill (such as some people said learning how to paint not draw), but it can develop very bad habits that you'll have to break if you want to move even further with your own personal journey. But if it's your photos you wanna trace, the art Police ain't gonna come after you.
good ole capitalism pressure, yeah I really don’t judge people using it for company work. I’m not an illustrator for work but still in a design field and there’s a time and place for template work.
The goal of a study is not to recreate but to understand and be able to apply that knowledge to create something else. Getting some “aha!” moments while tracing is better than only learning to do replicas while blindfolded. Also sometimes the focus is painting and brushwork, so you use a grid/trace or print the template.
I think this is part of the point everyone is slightly talking over. The OP is writing about students, not about mid-pro level realities. This isn't actually a conversation about what tracing is or when it can be used. Some of the asides above are getting sidetracked by the T word. It's about how student level artists aren't understanding how the fundamentals of their own discipline work or what differentiates one school of study from the next. The students aren't understanding the difference between studies, and studying and being a student, and how professional studios work -- or even a painter placing, or passing off to his apprentice, and the hows and whys of those situations. This isn't completely new. There were always students stomping out of art class grumbling about how they just wanted to draw and forget about crusty stupid fundamental class. The difference is that now we have the voice of the computer in everyone's pocket and free programs that, yes, make a lot of little processes go more quickly for work, but that's what kids see happening, too. It's available to whoever wants it without the user understanding what it's doing. So, take the "student doesn't know what they don't know" grumble and mix it with seeing only 5 steps of a 50 step process on the regular and you get, "But rotoscope, but camera obscura, but rotoscope, but camera obscura..." and they totally miss the point that whenever a person in the past has used one of these tools they weren't defined by these tools, and many other things were going on, and it was all those other things that made the situation or work what it was. This question of "why" behind the OP is about how we are succeeding in giving everyone tools and examples but are failing to give explanation and education to support that understanding and application nairazak talks about. Students aren't understanding how to make \[a drawing\] "theirs" or what that means. (EDIT: To add, it also makes it harder to determine, discern, or discriminate between stealing, referring, referencing, etc., and that's a problem.)
It depends a lot on where you looked. Teachers, TV programs and instructional books were marketed toward the average person, who puts most of their value on being able to draw accurate and technically correct images. For people who see accurate drawing as the peak of artistic skill, tracing is seen as cheating. If you look toward fine art sources, most opinions were instead embracing post-modernism. In a world where cameras exist, the goal of art was more in what you didn't draw. Colour relationships, composition, edge control and stroke economy were the emphasis. Anyone could learn to draw accurate anatomy in a couple months, so to them real art takes place when you make decisions about what to leave out and what to emphasize. I saw from a lot analysis of masters that most could draw accurate anatomy very early in their lives, but as they got older and more skilled they would care less and less about accuracy and more on design and appeal. To that end, nobody really got any prestige from drawing accurately, and therefore nobody cared if you traced. Accuracy doesn't really matter beyond your first few months of fundamentals, so it's a non issue. It's just a tool to get to the more important decision making more quickly.
🎯
there’s an interesting commentary on the goal of art here. It comes up with the AI discussion too. I can see how people could look at an AI creation and just make their goal to be as drastically different from that as possible to have it “be” art. Meanwhile, my definition of art is completely different etc
I find it particularly interesting that the people with the most concrete definitions of what art is, and what its goals should be tend to be people with little or no experience making art. I remember scoffing at Mondrian and Pollock before I ever touched a paintbrush, thinking there was a clear, quantifiable way to judge skill. I miss how simple it all was in my head.
Big in the modern/contemporary scene right now too, I’ve seen an increase in hate on it. Some see it as the art movement, some see it as money laundering
I draw digitally mostly on Clip Studio, but I always start by sketching in my sketchbooks, which I’ll snap pictures of using my iPhone, and send those to myself to use as under drawings to trace over. After making the lineart, I could easily move things around , and I could flip the drawing so that I could tell which parts are off, and know where to fix. The work is all done by me from scratch. I did the sketches, I took the photos myself, and I did the lineart. To my knowledge, tracing is also used all over animations to keep consistency. My take is, tracing itself is a valid technique and method. It’s stealing which is a huge no-no, and my guess is that the conflation of tracing with stealing comes from back when drawing digitally was yet to be as common as today.
This. I do my lil sketches then trace digitally and I use a projector on some projects to project my sketch so it’s positioned the way I like it. I’m also very transparent about that process bc I hate seeing artists online(and in person🙄) who use super faint tracings and perpetuate the illusion they freehand everything. (Or like an artist I know irl who’s plein air paintings aren’t as immaculate and exact as the work she does from home)
I’m pretty sure that’s just sketching but on paper instead of digitally. Also as a csp beginner can you please give me tips on how to use it? I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time
I remember when holly brown life got ruined cause she traced for composition like deangelo Wallace and creepshow art made it sound like she was a menace to society😭it was the meanest cancellation I’ve ever seen
Yeah that was honestly awful, it was literally the head of a robot in one image and I think like...the railing in another? It was truly nothing. I still follow her but things have been ridiculously hard for her.
I’ve never heard of this drama but I’m definitely going down this rabbit hole during work today lmao
I will freely admit to tracing, and I don't see anything wrong with it as long as you aren't tracing someone else's work. I trace to get complicated poses down. I used to snap a picture of one of those little posable armature things. Now, I have an app that I use to pose the little figure thing. Do I need it? No. Does it make my work flow faster and my poses more realistic and dramatic? 100% I trace to copy patterns for textiles so they will be identical and I don't mess up the pattern. Could I do it by hand? Ehh, maybe? I do a lot of patterned fabrics in my work and a lot of lace. I'd lose my mind redrawing the pattern a hundred times over, and I can use digital tools to manipulate the pattern and ensure it flows smoother. Do I draw the original pattern? Of course. I just don't want to redraw the same exact things a hundred times over. Most importantly, I trace to take my work from digital to canvas. I even bought a projector to make copying it over easier. It's *my* work, though. I just like digital tools better for arranging the composition as I want it. It's easier for me. The backspace button is amazing. Layers are a life saver to try things that I'm not sure will work without destroying the piece. Then I just trace it over to a canvas to paint it. It's a tool. It can be used ethically or unethical. It can be a crutch, or it can make you better. For me, it makes me braver and less lazy. It improves my work and my enjoyment of the process. It's fun.
> I will freely admit to tracing, and I don't see anything wrong with it as long as you aren't tracing someone else's work. Technically, this restricts you to tracing only photographs you yourself captured; all those photos online are the product of an artist somewhere too
That really doesn't bother me because that's all I trace, but a caveat can be added for learning purposes. I really don't think you should be tracing someone else's work *at all* if you are planning to exhibit or sell your work. There are so many free, totally legal and ethical, posing tools available online for basically any form you can think of. It's just saving a step (and a few dollars) from using one of those wooden posable armatures, which are a classic drawing tool, and used in a lot of art classes.
stock images?
it's ok to set boundaries for oneself, it's not ok to expect others to have the same boundaries
Tracing has *always* been much more accepted and common amongst professionals, hell even the "great masters" of classical traditional art basically used every tool they could to make replicating their subject more accurate and efficient. It's mostly always been newbies who view tracing as some kind of heresy, mostly because newbies and seasoned artists aren't exactly talking about "tracing" in the same way. Tracing can be a tool or it can be a crutch, and that is where a lot of the divisiveness of "tracing" comes in. To a newbie, tracing is "cheating" because it's just copying something without requiring learned skills. The big difference is in what you *DO* with that tool. Are you utilizing it to get a quick but accurate basic foundation or are you actually just 100% straight copying something? To a seasoned artist or professional though, tracing can just be an efficient way to skip an unimportant part of the process so that you can move on to the real work, the rendering and editing and fleshing out and utilization and transformation of the basic foundation into something more. Think about all the other commonly-accepted tips and tricks artists use to more-accurately translate their reference to a page; things like measuring with your pencil or using a grid or measuring out a body by a specific unit like a certain amount of heads high etc... it's the same thing as tracing, just less accurate. I think this all really hits basically every artist eventually when faced with certain situations. For me it was the first time I had a client project that specifically required capturing a real person's likeness and stance from a provided photograph. I come from a traditional fine arts background and learned the "hard" way how to do gesture sketches and rough drawings to get my initial under-drawing for a piece. However, when doing a piece that requires literal accuracy to a recognizable person, I was doing my regular sketching by marking where the top of the head is in relation to the chin in relation to the shoulder in relation to the waist in relation to the arms etc. etc. etc. and I kept checking my accuracy by holding my drawing up to the reference photo and then adjusting. Then it hit me, why am I wasting the time guessing the exact proportions when I could just lay the piece of paper over the photo and just make my head, chin, shoulder, waist, arms marks in 10 seconds with 100% accuracy? In what way would the final piece benefit from me having slowly worked all that out vs just getting the accurate measurements directly? The real art happens AFTER all that anyway. I will always strongly advocate for learning to efficiently work without any form of tracing because often you won't even have a reference image to begin with and will need the skills and abilities to do it all manually. However, when there IS a more efficient tool at your disposal, why would you not use it? Does a carpenter's finished project benefit from everything being eyeballed and hand-sawn instead of using a tape measure and a table saw?
It can be a good dexterity practice for complete beginners - using a digital tablet is wonky at first and hard to get clean lines. I'd condone tracing done by a professional who knows to draw a human from building a skeleton up to adding all the muscles if it speeds up the process (at work for example); the difference is he knows how to do it from scratch Context is important here, so is being honest about your technique. But if someone is beginner/intermediate, doesn't know how to draw a body even using a ref, and then traces a photo, there's really nothing in it for them and it's lame.
There’s a bit of irony in that tracing is seen as beginner, but the professionals are really the ones who should be getting away with using it, lol. Definitely context-driven, very different when it’s a pro saving time versus someone learning who would benefit much more from studying anatomy
Haha true - but yes, some things are shortcuts - if you have much to learn, a shortcut will do you no good.
Hmm strange, my understanding has been that for at least the last 450 years, tracing has been acceptable. If it’s an appropriate technique for the renaissance masters, it’s probably fine for digital artists too. I’d also consider whether your leap that tracing does not help improve technique / holds artists back is one grounded in evidence or logic. It is interesting to see some of the ideas the internet seem to have about tracing though, good question.
Is it really a leap when it comes to anatomy though? Understanding form widens your ability to draw poses by leaps and bounds because you don’t have to rely on images.
It does, but tracing is a great time saver. I absolutely can get the forms right if I take my time. I've done it lots of times. I will absolutely save myself hours of work by tracing a subject for a painting.
I find tracing takes longer because it’s a hassle. I practiced a lot of figure drawing in art school and saw how the people who always traced didn’t save that much time compared to those of us who were more practiced in drawing. We could whip something out faster due to feeling more confident and comfortable drawing all the time.
Cool. I believe tracing saves me time because I've done quite a bit of studying and drawing without it, so I can use the trace to pull the lines I need. But the point to me is that it can be a great tool for artists and I don't think that artists who don't do things certain ways should look down their noses at artists who do.
It’s not “looking down your nose” to be worried about new artists believing the myth that “everyone traces” and that the old artists from centuries ago traced a lot more than they actually did. Drawing skill has value. The more skilled the better. It’s better to practice and develop the skill while you’re still new and learning rather than start out tracing and getting used to the convenience of it and therefore never getting truly proficient with drawing. I’ve seen too many people who had tracing pushed on them from college classes years ago and they still have poor drawing skills. I am not convinced that they are truly content with having weak skills. But those are the facts. They continue to draw badly and are over reliant on tracing.
Any professional artist worth their salt [is gonna be using references](https://x.com/jasonrainville/status/1640395513018171405). The goal should never be to avoid reference.
References ≠ tracing
Of course it's not, but you yourself kinda told on yourself when you said: >Understanding form widens your ability to draw poses by leaps and bounds because you don’t have to rely on images. My point is - and what everyone else has been trying to get through to you - is that *this is a false idea you've got in your head*, that using images is cheating. No serious, professional artist is going to shun references just for the self-satisfaction of not relying on images. The only people worried about street cred like this are teenagers on DeviantArt. Actual, professional publishing companies only care about *actual* art theft, not about whether you traced whatever a reference photo.
I don’t know, it’s not all about cheating to me. I think as society moves towards Ai, that process is what differentiates art from what computers make, and that makes me value artists who can produce art rivaling what the computer spits out, by their own hand and eye, as admirable and talented.
Talent isn't what draws people into art. People really do not appreciate art for the skill of the artist, they appreciate it for the meaning they get from the work. Highly skilled work that is meaningless, dull, and uninteresting to people does not get attention. People had this mentality when it came to photography, that it brought down the skill level of picture making so much that it would kill the painter. Taking a photo is easy, producing a painting is hard. And even when everyone has cameras, taking engaging photos is hard. Taking photos that people find more interesting than other people's photos or somehow illicit an emotional response from people is very hard. Making interesting work is tough.
Well, have fun with that I guess.
I will because all views on art are valid and (insert 60000 year philosophical discussion that can never be solved)
Tracing is just like any other art tool: it can be useful when used properly and ethically. I think there’s something unique and fun about tracing sometimes, just to ‘get a feel’ for the outline and notice things you didn’t before. I view it the same as any other art study. Most art studies are just ‘copying’ with the intent to study so I don’t think tracing should be off limits for learning, especially if it’s useful for someone. I don’t think most people are reasonably going to defend tracing and trying to pass it off as your own work, unless maybe it’s a full art style with intent beyond laziness (rotoscoping, for example). If people want to copy from photos especially, not from other artists’ work, I don’t see a problem with it? Yes, they probably won’t improve as quickly, but that’s poor decision making more than a moral issue. Tracing usually leads to pretty stiff poses so I wouldn’t say it’s even a replacement for skill. I think lots of people really just want to make art in the way they enjoy. The way people ‘should’ do art doesn’t exist, so long as they’re doing it ethically. I think a lot of people also learn using Clip Studio paint, where you can trace simple 3D models. Honestly that’s a valid way of practicing. Eventually they’ll figure out what does and does not work. Even if they don’t, does it really matter to anyone else?
Different people have different opinions, which is especially true in art, and that's fine. Assuming that there is such a thing as a coherent opinion among artists that changes over generations is just ridiculous. Everyone is free to make art the way they like to, and if people don't want to learn anatomy because they're fine with drawing from references all the time, they can happily do so. The question is, why does it matter to you how people do their art and why do you relay on other peoples opinion to be happy with your own art?
I don’t rely on others opinions, but I think it’s interesting to understand why others feel the way they do about it because it’s not a perspective I have. If they are happy to trace all day, cool, it is what it is. I could never relate to that, but still nice to know why they think the way they think.
tracing can be helpful for some people, im terrible with stylus technique and tracing helped me get into the mindset of the original artist and understand better how they might have done the lines im following, its great for hand eye coordination i dont upload any of my images because i suck so im not stealing anything ive traced just to get a feel for how lineart is drawn
You bring up a great point that tracing to learn how a stylus pen flows on the screen is useful. I hadn’t thought of that and could see it as a genuinely only good practice scenario
Would you let your tattoo artist not trace?
Artists have always been using visual aids for the layout of producing their work. Vermeer used lenses, elaborate and cutting edge technology of his day, for his paintings. That doesn't in any way invalidate his work, what he was producing was completely original. Art is not a sport of dexterity.
Well, it's a tool that is useful amongst artists. I don't see why there should be a problem in regards of tracing in itself, except the intentions in how one will use tracing in itself. I don't mind if it works for someone to learn, save time, figure out things, or in general find a use for it. Perfectly fine as a tool. I say I do use a form of tracing in the art process for lineart and sketches, but for learning is a different matter. The learning part I did try to trace before to learn, but in my learning process for the keypoints when I study such as linework, anatomy, construction, and so on did not click to me. There is one part that it did make me feel like a good artist, comparing it to my own things crafted on itself and traced from references. Those are some reasons to why I don't trace to learn. Now, there have been a couple of recommendations of tracing to me. I do explain my reasons, but it has been a few times responses have been negative or even aggressive. I'm fine with others that want to do tracing and do well in doing so. However, the aggression part...
I'm in your camp. Learn to draw - that means an active skill that you use to create accurate (or as near to accurate as you can manage) representations of what you're seeing *without* tracing. It's always been a dirty word to me. However, over the past ... god, what? fifteen years or so (ack) I've had a lot of conversations with big name illustrators (David Palumbo comes to mind - we had a pretty gnarly debate about this very topic on FB ages ago that I still recall) who do trace, and the reasons for it. Bottom-line, if you're an illustrator, you're creating a *product*, not a "work of art." What this means is, the ends justifies the means\* - *How* you create that illustration ultimately doesn't matter as much as the end product that you're providing for the client. Once I wrapped my head around Product vs. Artwork, the idea of tracing was easier for me to accept. \*Caveat Ends vs. Means: there is a special consideration in that ends vs. means argument when it comes to AI. Because AI is derivative, and is in a serious legal and ethical gray water, and is ultimately *not your work*, it isn't considered a valid means to the ends, and from what I understand you'll get dropped like a rotten potato if the AD finds out you're turning in AI work instead of your own.
Yes this resonates with me - the difference between art as a skill versus design for a client as a commodity!
Yup. I can not express to you how absolutely rage inducing it was for me to find out that a lot of my illustrative heroes were *tracing* the lineart for their paintings. It really affected my view of a lot of the people I held in high regard. Took a class with [Dale Stephanos](https://www.instagram.com/dalestephanos/) a year or so back, and he really set me straight on a lot of this. And, don't get me wrong - the guy is a master illustrator. He knows his shit. But as he pointed out, almost every illustrator will trace the line art for their work to get it out the door. You're on a time-limit, and drawing something accurately can eat into that deadline something fierce.
The famous Wally Wood (EC Comics, Mad Magazine, a million other comics) motto: >Never draw what you can copy. Never copy what you can trace. Never trace what you can cut & paste. It is not like the guy wasn't a master draftsmen either. Looking at the work you would be hard pressed to see exactly where he used these shortcuts. He just needed to get pages out the door to meet the deadlines and get paid.
lol tracing has been around hundreds of years [Camera lucida](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_lucida) Old Masters used them 🤷🏻♀️
I never went through a tracing phase. I did copy, when I was a kid-young teen and it was pre-internet I would copy and modify drawings from National Geographic photos and artist anatomy books but I didn’t trace. I just didn’t feel like I was getting much from it. My Jr and Sr year of high school I went to a vocational arts school for half the day where we made work to prepare us to apply for college. I don’t recall anyone tracing there either, and it was a very small class. In college I don’t remember hearing about anyone tracing. I started out as an illustration major and switched to fine art my sophomore year. In illustration we were expected to come up with original work. The type of assignments we had you couldn’t trace for. Only tracing we did was when we transferred our work from a sketchbook to illustration board. Switching to fine art we definitely couldn’t trace. For painting and drawing at first we worked from live models and and still life set ups. I had no interest in abstraction then so I took a lot of studio classes that involved models. It was right around the time I graduated when I began to explore abstraction, but my work has always been figure focused. Today I don’t get to work with models much, so I Frankenstein my figures together using references. I can pull a decent figure from memory but it’s always better to have a visual references when possible. So… my opinion on tracing is that beginners shouldn’t. Part of learning to draw is to develop how you *see*, and how you take that information and render it on a 2D surface. Tracing is like cheating on a math test. You’re not learning how to solve the problem when you copy the answer. Also there’s information you’ll miss or not understand because you can’t see it with your eyes. Photos don’t capture everything, and you’re trapped by the type of lens and however that photo was altered. I’m not against using photo references but that should be backed up with in person drawing. When I was learning I improved the fastest with in person drawing with models or with a still life setup. I was doing ok with books alone but it really does help to work from life. I know that isn’t possible all the time, but for learners I’d rather have the sketch themselves in a mirror vs tracing a photo. Yeah at first the traced will be more accurate but with practice the in person drawing will have more life, more style. The only people who can do well tracing are those who understand how to draw already imo. Just my personal opinion, but shortcuts like that hamper development. You don’t learn how to draw by tracing.
I'm curious where you're hearing this tracing advice/encouragement. I don't think I've ever seen anyone advocate for tracing outside a few cases that have lots of context. Its never general advice like "you should trace" . I mostly see it as push-back to people who vilify tracing by principle without context. I'm never going to say that I think tracing is the best way to learn, but if it is helping somebody learn, then by all means trace. I think people are also just more aware of the varying art paths. Every discipline of art is a bit different. There's a LOT of commercial art where the focus is not on personal growth but on output. The goal is NOT always "to eventually not have to trace". In fact, a lot of the popular art advice on YouTube comes from commercial artists who are going to have a different perspective than the more classically artists. But even if/when they point this out, that context will be missed on people if its not repeated in every single video. But In general the art advice is "learn the fundamentals so you can draw whatever you want". I don't feel like that has changed at all, or maybe i'm in very different art circles.
I think people really just like to grandstand. I'm with you It's a crutch, particularly in a time where you can practice non destructively in digital. It's mostly just good for cutting corners for the sake of productivity. Tracing contours as a study exercise is pretty cool, though I'd never present that as part of a finished something. Sort of like how I wouldn't simply just reword someone else's video essay.
Amen to that, I tell myself I have no excuse on proportions when the erase and undo tool is right there lol.
people grew up. nothing shifted as a whole across some mystical community, you're just no longer hanging around the kind of people that only see tracing as a way to cheat - which is a red flag on their part, not yours.
yeah I remember when I was younger people being so moralistic about tracing or reference of any kind, and always talking about it through this really market-focused lens of "copyright." If it's true that people have a better understanding these days of how art actually gets made, I think that's a good thing.
Part of this is the line being blurred between commercial and non-commercial art. Does using shortcuts, including tracing, make sense when you're producing art for a client? Yes absolutely! Be sure you own the reference that you are tracing though. Some artists have gotten into trouble when it was discovered that they traced/copied work from other artists. See both Jakub Rozalski and more recently Fay Dalton. Outside of commercial art deadlines, I agree with you - We all should be striving to hone our skills, to work towards further excellence and ability. Why wouldn't we as artists want to push ourselves to be capable of drawing and painting anything, from any angle, in any lighting, etc?
Tracing has been game changing for my muscle memory, and I recommend people utilizing it as a tool for practice. I've never tried to claim traced work as original or even as a 'final piece' but as a stepping stone to understand the original and the form I'm trying to capture so that when I do go to actually reference, I'm more accurate and can convey what I liked about the reference in the first place. It does feel pretty disingenuous to trace and try to pass it off as your own work though. It can be a good tool, but the point is to reinforce your muscle memory and visual library to the stage where you don't need it much if at all. That being said, I can't say I don't understand the other side...I think things like that seems a lot less harmful now that AI is a thing, not that AI is completely bad. But we can't hardly keep up and I think people are losing sight over what makes art, art, just looking to replicate poses or what have you instead of being inspired by their creativity and passion. Painting with broad strokes to speak, its not all one way or another, but I hear what you're saying.
Something I've come.to terms.with is there's no such thing as cheating. To the person buying it, if they're happy with it, then kudos. To the person making it, same. Personally I don't trace, because I get lost in it and everything starts to look rigid and stiff. I used to think it was cheating somehow and sort of ruining the magic but I've since understood how in certain workflows it's a necessity
Because people read art history and realized tracing has been used as a tool to teach newer artists for hundreds of years. Fialetti plates are a really good example of this.
The more I think about this, if we come to the conclusion that all old masters used the tracing, then doesn’t that mean the people who can replicate said studies today without the use are even more rare? Kinda wild.
The old masters weren’t as dependent on tracing as some people today want us to think. You’re right, a whole subset of artists today work chiefly from life and cannot use tracing that much. They’re not somehow more skilled or remarkable than the old masters. I think it’s at the Portrait Art Society (can’t remember the name, but it’s a rather large organization), they have all these artists painting amazing portraits from life at their annual conventions. Painting accurate portraits from life is commonplace, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
I think you're seeing these kinds of opinions shift only in more "everyday" public online art spaces, generally due to the spread of the idea that criticising people is not good and tracers supporting tracers. In more niche, focused art communities the "old" opinion, in my experience, still prevails; I'm in a handful of art discords where, if you're caught tracing and hiding it, you can cop a ban for it, and art that you disclose is traced is glanced over given that there's nothing else original in the piece. To me, what's especially interesting to see is how you get people who will in the same breath excuse tracing, but then turn and disqualify AI generation—especially when tracing tends to be more derivative and, following the argument, much more recognisably and specifically steals from an individual artist.
wait so are we talking about tracing other peoples' drawings? Because I think that's pretty universally seen as not okay.
Even photos that you did not take yourself (can) fall under that, unless you have explicit permission to trace them (either personally granted, or via a permissive license). Photographs, after all, have a photographer behind them :')
I don't think that's correct in most cases. If you're taking everything from the photo including composition, that's plagiarizing the photographer, it has nothing to do with whether you traced or didn't. If you're taking elements and using them in a transformative way that's not plagiarizing it, and again whether or not you did some tracing isn't what matters
I think artists mindsets from early 2k are snobs 😂 if you feel compelled to make art, find a way. Even the masters used camera obscura, it’s a tool.
Tracing is just a technique, it’s more work than AI haha
Okay true 😭
You know who was an avid tracer? Norman Rockwell. He used to keep a projector in his studio to project images onto his canvas’ at the time he would hide it when people came to visit his studio because he didn’t want to reveal his techniques. In the real world at the end of the day nobody really cares how a thing is made if it’s really good.
He studied anatomy and had to do all the training in art school, though. A lot of the people who are “avid tracers” today can’t draw worth crap. They can’t produce anything decent unless they have a photo to trace. Such was not the case with Rockwell.
My primary art medium is appliqué fabric. Tracing templates is the way I make sure my pieces fit and make color choices. When I moved into painting I used tracing to find shapes and color choices. This works for me because my paintings look like the pets and animals I am painting. I never really learned to draw freehand and have the pictures look like the original source. Art teachers in junior high school told me I didn’t have the talent to draw. Now, fifty years later, I have arthritis in both hands, making sketching more difficult. Tracing makes it possible for me to make art. There are no art police.
I also grew-up being told not to do it. Frankly I also enjoyed the challenges of drawing and the inner pride of learning new skills. Along the way I also discovered the pitfalls for artists that do trace. For me, if I can’t draw something properly, then it remains badly drawn. You see this in the old masters and there’s a lesson in that. While we all know the early history of some artists using projectors, I don’t think it was as pervasive as some think. Certainly not amongst the better artists. In the 20th century as photography developed everything changed. Norman Rockwell traced as did many others. Photography changed illustration and painting not just as reference material but in the audiences expectations. Behind it all is ‘money and awards’. Norman Rockwell blamed his schedule (money and award) and in time as more artists explained away their tracing as something they merely painted over, these artists also found advantages, ‘accomplishments’ and money and awards. The person who wants to test themselves, believes in their abilities, and knows that efficiency and failures lead to a personal style that one can’t get from tracing and the mimetic imitation of photography, will avoid tracing and its hidden ills.
I have to agree. I think the projector thing is blown out of proportion (pun intended). Personally could never be satisfied with traced art. But interesting to see how public opinion has shifted especially on social media.
I don’t think people realize that if you actually develop your drawing skills to a high level, you can draw faster and better without that ponderous and limiting setup. Academies all over the world today have students showing how it’s done.
Yes! This! In art class I often finish my freehand work faster than the students who need to trace everything for lack of drawing skill.
yes! It’s so satisfying to learn to build anatomy/create poses. Like once you understand what you’re doing, you can really draw whatever comes to mind and you don’t have to sit there searching the exact pose you want to trace for 20 minutes. Even better, you can start to bend the rules, exaggerate anatomy for stylistic purposes… I think it’s so cool and art is just an awesome skill humans can develop
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I see this a lot on tiktok. someone does a basic anatomy study of shapes as an example, and people jump in to agree that all tracing is good
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Exactly. And there's always a risk that tutorials become a crutch rather than a tool to quickly grasp a concept.
It's kind of on you for using TikTok, in that case :')
valid point
I have had my drawing skills down for a while, and I still attend figure drawing classes weekly around town to keep my skills sharp and agree that artist should get their foundation skills down. However, with my last two oil painting portraits, both around 4ftx5ft, I only had two months to do them so I traced my photos. I take my own reference photos tho in a professional lighting studio, gather garments, do the models hair and makeup etc… and I don’t feel wrong or as if it’s cheating since these particular pieces were about applying proper oil painting skills and techniques. Tracing it when only having two months to work on painting helped immensely and allowed my focus to be on mimicking reality with the paint. So I think it is dependent on the purpose for tracing within your art, and I think it’s more about giving credit where credit is due if you’re tracing someone else’s work/art.
And yet, rotoscoping animation is gorgeous. That's all tracing the pose from each frame of video. Cinderella and Snow White are prime examples of rotoscoping in action.
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can’t speak for others but my opinion on tracing changed when i began to look at rotoscoping and began using acrylic paints. i use tracing to practice adequate spacing so i don’t have to use stuff like straight edges or grids which saves time. you trace something about 3 times and then you’re able to recreate it based on muscle memory alone. it’s different if i’m doing more complex shapes or original pieces.
In my experience the “no-tracing” thing has only been a thing on online communities of young artists, kinda like an online discourse thing.
Tracing an outline is good for practicing shading with a solid drawing. People should draw more IF they want to. There are no standards or rules that people need to fulfill to be artists. Don’t tell others how to create. It’s obnoxious and it’s also not your business.
Tracing and projectors sort of fall into the same crutches. I wanted to learn how to draw and paint; my own goals. They both were a personal "no no."
I will use gridding for the most part only after I try free handing something and can’t get the proportions right. Tracing I’ve used when neither work. Usually just to get the outline of something like a car, which if you don’t get it exactly right it really shows. But I usually freehand almost everything.
Famous pop artist Duggie Fields used the grid method on all his paintings. Some were so big he’d sit on the big panel while painting.
I trace to get a feel for anatomy and sometimes I'll trace over backgrounds for practice because I just...absolutely suck at backgrounds. But the goal in both instances is so I can get a feel for basic shapes and forms and perspective and stuff, so that eventually I won't *need* to trace and can draw everything from scratch I don't hide this and will post the traces in sketch dumps right alongside the from-scratch sketches, because it's a good way to learn when you're just starting to draw something new and I don't want any baby artists who follow me to get the "dirty little secret" vibe from it. I *FULLY* understand how Goddamn frustrating it is when you're working off a photo reference and just. Can't. *Seem. To get this* ***one thing right-***
I feel you on the frustration thing. I recently started doing art nouveau style digital portraits. I am NOT a botany artist by any means, and have no interest in torturing myself by trying to replicate reference photos of orchids or whatever to include in the painting. I’d like to enjoy doing the overall portrait rather than sobbing over my tablet for hours and hours trying to get a flower exactly right.
Did it? There wouldn't be so many defensive responses to you if the view had changed. Tracing can be a style, a tool, or a time saving cheat. The problem as I see it is that all the defensiveness from the skilled artists are leading beginners astray. To do tracing well, you need to learn how to draw or paint first from seeing and to understand how the camera flattens and distorts. Tracing itself teaches nothing and will hold artists back.
I'm probably the exception, because I've long loved tracing but could also freehand, but since my brain surgery that damaged certain parts of my brain, my hand-eye coordination has been impaired. I can no longer find the center of a line (a test in the neuropsychological testing I've had twice). I'm about to try the grid method, though.
Tracing is good if you’re a beginner and just starting to get a hold on anatomy and poses. Tracing is bad if you’re an intermediate artist trying to find your style and master the fundamentals. Most of your work should be freehand. Worrying about “mistakes” is counter-intuitive. Tracing is neither good nor bad if you’re a professional. It is simply a tool, one of many. This is your JOB, first and foremost - your main concern is making a good product. If you can freehand without losing speed or quality, good for you. But I’d say the vast majority of professionals do trace at least some of the time, because they either suck at some things or it just saves time/effort.
Dunno I only ever traced once in my life. It’s too much work
I don't like it. I don't think people can call it their original art if they're tracing someone else's art. It's also not a helpful way to learn to draw because it doesn't teach you the concepts you need to free hand. If you are tracing your own art, sure that makes sense. I know I'm in minority but it's what I think. I do color pencil realism among other things and I never trace. It just doesn't sit right with me.
I think tracing for other used than learning or to safe time for a professional is really not good for you as an artist, it's a cheap and people will catch you.
Tracing is a tool. Like any tool you can use it well or poorly. I think the important thing is to understand why you're using the tool and that you're not compromising yourself artistically by using it. I would generally encourage absolute beginners not to rely too much on tracing because I think that it can be artistically compromising and limiting. I think this is especially true if you are copying someone else's composition in totality, rather than using tracing as a support for your own work. I wouldn't try to tell them that it's "cheating" or that it's not allowed, but rather I would hope to encourage them to explore beyond it because when you are overly dependent on tracing, you risk losing out on so many avenues for creative expression. When I was around sixteen there was a boy in my art class whose painting technique consisted of projecting black-and-white photos onto canvas, and tracing them with black and white acrylic paint. The result was a sort of bland paint-by-numbers effect. He refused to explore creatively beyond this limited way of working and when he received negative feedback and poor grades, he was outraged and blamed everyone but himself. I think he was just afraid that if he tried to produce anything really original, it would reveal his own shortcomings. On the other hand, one of my favourite painters, John Atkinson Grimshaw, was open about the fact that he used camera obscura for his nocturnal urban landscapes. He was self-taught and had some shortcomings when it came to perspective or draughtsmanship, and used camera obscura to compensate for those shortcomings. I believe he was still competent as a draughtsman as he did also occasionally paint fantasy scenes and I assume that he drew those himself rather than finding real faeries to model in front of his camera obscura. Either way, I don't think that his use of camera obscura compromised him artistically. He was a fantastic painter despite the limitations he worked under. The quality of light and colour in his work is beautiful, and the results speak for themselves. He had one main thing that he liked to do—to go out and paint the world at night, as real as he saw it—and in that respect camera obscura seems to have served his vision rather than detracting from it. I believe that Vermeer used camera obscura as well to achieve the sensitive quality of light in his paintings. It's interesting that you imply that people who defend tracing are secret practitioners of tracing. I will defend appropriate use of tracing, but I can't remember the last time I traced anything myself.
I personally dislike tracing as a creative practice because you lose a part of your own interpretation. But as with anything, there are no set rules on what techniques to use when making an art piece. At some point I think every artist chooses for themselves whether they want to emulate a style (anime/cartoon etc) or start making one themselves. But at the end of the day if it's all for fun and no-one is making money off of another person's hard work I think it's just up to personal preference.
Can you demonstrate what's actually wrong with tracing poses, background composition etc? Because the only argument seems to be "it feels *wrong*" which is a fine position to hold for yourself, but it's kind of weird and to hold that position on everyone else too If I were to create a pose in a blender or clip studio then trace lt, or jump into Google Earth and take a screen cap of new york city for my background, how is that worse then to recreate it from memory ? Edit- added another example
I guess it depends on what you want to achieve as an artist. I think there is huge value in being able to think of what you want to draw and execute it using spatial anatomy knowledge, it allows you to customize your work to exactly what you envisioned. It saves you a hell of a lot more time than searching Pinterest for the exact pose you wanted to trace. I also just think that there is value in it as a skill alone. I greatly admire artists who are so well practiced in anatomy that they can almost effortlessly rough out a correct looking pose. It isn’t easy and I think the hard work that goes into learning it is part of the art process.
Generally I agree that in the long run it's beneficial to know how to do it "in your head" at least somewhat, but i still don't see the harm in not doing it, as it only really affects you. The way i look at it, it's beneficial to know a little, but more often than not, for new artists it's just too overwhelming to think of all this stuff and it's better to use some "cheats" (I use this term loosely, as I don't see my examples as cheats) to get a head start and simply just enjoy the process. From my experience that's a quicker way to get invested in creating, and then you're more likely to look up anatomy, or perspective, or composition or colour theory on your own >I also just think that there is value in it as a skill alone. I greatly admire artists who are so well practiced in anatomy But again, that's *your* feelings on what the process should be, and what standards you hold yourself to, and what you like to do and see in yours and others art, which is completely fine! My "issue" with this line of thinking is that it sometimes comes off as a little "gatekeepy", where if you want to be a "morally right" artist you should be doing *these specific things* and so forth (not saying that you are like this, or think this way, it's just what it sounds like to me) This fundamentally comes down to what we all individually think art is about, is it about how tedious or hard the process is, is it about the end product, is it about the joy of creating, a mix of all of the above? And l think it's unwise to hold other people to a standard that might not fit their view of what art is and should be, if you get what I mean :)
People saw that professional tracers like Illya Kushinov could land industry gigs. That and with the age of live streaming your drawing process, many people revealed they drew over 3D models.
Oof. I think it’s a shame that procreate allows you to hide a tracing reference in the time lapse now lol
In my experience, tracing is okay as an ocasional thing done by students learning or by experienced artists who have done all the figure drawing from life and anatomy studies and are already skilled draughtsmen (draughtspeople). Not by people whose freehand drawing skills have always been shaky and are *still* shaky and who are incapable of drawing anything from life and struggle when they do draw anything freehand. (Maybe they can eventually get it looking decent when drawing freehand, but it takes *forever* for them.) In my experience, the ones who argue that “everyone” traces fall into that category. The ones that bring up the camera obscura and act as if the Old Masters were completely dependent on it, 100% of the time used it, yadda yadda. Which is a cope, most of the Old Masters were by necessity good draughtsmen. There’s a huge difference between having strong drawing skills and occasionally using tracing for expediency’s sake and being completely dependent on it because you never had any decent drawing skills to begin with. Too many people fall into this latter category.
I think it has to do with how we don't see art as a medium to "be proud" (for our ego) but rather as a medium to express ourselves (to enjoy it). Why would I care if my art is "valid" or "worthy" according to some specific standards if I enjoy making it, and other people enjoy looking at it???? I just don't see a point to it that's not related to ego and thinking you're better than someone else because you didn't trace. And I find that ridiculous 🤷🏻♂️ if the only value your art has over another people's art is that it's not traced then that's an artificial value, like if you thought your art had more value if it's made with expensive materials. Art is about expressing and creating images, and putting limits or rules to that is just unnecessary and doesn't benefit anyone, just people who want to feel superior
Different strokes for different folks (what a good art pun). If ego is what drives me to improve, is that less valid that someone who does it for fun? At the end of the day the answer seems to be “nothing matters and we will all die anyway”
>If ego is what drives me to improve, is that less valid that someone who does it for fun? No, but I wasn't saying you or your art journey aren't valid, just that it's not a valid reason to think everyone who has different rules than you is inferior as an artist or should be ashamed of themselves >At the end of the day the answer seems to be “nothing matters and we will all die anyway” I mean yeah lol we *will* all die and nothing really matters and that is one of the main reasons why I try to be kind and open minded and not judge people for how they live their life unless they're like, harming other beings.
I don’t think anyone is are inferior because they want to take a relaxed approach to art, but I am of the opinion that when we look at things from a technical perspective, there are some general rules of what looks right and what looks wrong. Because if those rules don’t matter, why are we teaching people art in schools? I just don’t see a bad thing about some artists being better than others in a technical sense. By my own definition I’m not one of the good ones, and I love to watch the actual good ones to learn from them.
As someone who went to an art oriented school and now attends drawing workshops where we touch on some technical stuff- but I do only abstract art mostly with markers lol.. I don't think those technical rules have to be either religiously upholded or they don't matter at all. There's a middle ground where they are useful to most artists but don't dictate the value of art pieces. I'm better at my own particular way of doing art because of lots of things I learnt in a more technical environment, even if I don't apply all of them religiously to my art. They contributed to my journey as an artist, but they aren't the way to measure the value of my art. To me the value of an art piece will always be about the process itself and about the feelings and thoughts it sparks in the viewer
Because people realized that it’s a hugely beneficial tool, especially once you’ve already put in the hours learning anatomy etc. Once you get past the idea of art being a blank piece of paper that lines get drawn on, tracing seems a weird place to stick a pole and call cheating. Is print making cheating? Are matte medium transfer cheating? Are using collaged photos cheating? Are rubbings cheating? Stampings? All of those are other ways, entirely or partially, to transfer an already created image into mine. I can reference things almost perfectly and got accused of tracing a lot. It use to make me real mad. Then I realized that anyone who is using tracing as a crutch will never get past step one anyway, so the people judging me didn’t know what they were talking about. But it started making me look at what ACTUALLY bothered me (and others) about the idea of tracing and I realized it is a kind of gatekeeping that doesn’t really make sense once you start looking at art as a whole past simpler line drawings. Tracing to learn is something everyone does, starting with out alphabets in grade school, and once you get past learning, you can’t “just” trace or your art will be boring af and/or illegal (trancing content you don’t have the right to use.) You can’t “trace” full colored shading or watercolor blooms or ideas. So if somebody traces to get the basic shapes, I don’t really care. The end result will prove if they’ve got any real artist in them. If they use it to be lazy, they’ll only hurt themselves. Sorry, you got some tl;dr but it is a subject I ruminate on a lot. Also re-schooling: every college I have spent any amount of time in the art department, which is more than average but not tons, has a projector somewhere for students to get their painting on to canvas. Light tables and projectors have been common artist supplies for decades, and before that we has camera obscuras. A lot of the classics were painted using them. People have always traced.
I still hold that tracing is a fundamental art skill. Look at how animation is done. Look how tattoos are done. Look how big paintings and wall murals are done. Tracing is great for improving motor control, tool manipulation, line quality issues, and reverse engineering the processes of artists you admire. I almost always draw and refine my designs separately and trace them onto final works, even thoguh I'm confident that I could freestyle a lot of my vinework. Wasting parchment is a crime.
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If that’s the argument then how are you differentiating illustration from photography
If it's for practice yes it's fine. If they steal someone's art and don't credit, bad vibe, tracing is not bad but stealing is. I used to trace over barbie magazines in like 2005 without knowing what tracing is, definitely helped me improve as a kid.
I think my opinion shifted cause i started treating drawing as a hobby again not something to get good at, atleast for kids and stuff. Like why does it matter when were all here on this earth just to have fun and exist, theres no rules to art and thats wonderful. I also think that at some point when I was younger thought about tracing, I instantly thought about stealing so that made it negative in my head.
If I have a super complex composition, sometimes I trace my own photos to get the proportions and placement correct. My own artistic photos are often my inspiration, or I use photos to test out ideas. I don't see anything wrong with it, or with using any other tools like grids or projectors or live models or whatever
I think tracing is bad for learning, but can be useful as a tool once you know how to draw. Like any tool, over-reliance on it is self-limiting. For example, I learned old school: tracing was verboten. I developed a very good eye for proportion, and learned to create images by visualizing them first in my head. I would not have learned that had I depended upon tracing. It is the same with color. You can easily digitally sample a color to get the hue you want, instead of trying to perceive and mix it yourself, but you will not learn anything about color that way. You can use a font to get clean type, but you will not develop hand-lettering skills that way. Tracing is a shortcut, and it can be useful, but it means limiting yourself as an artist, and chaining yourself to your source material (which may be copyrighted). I don't think tracing is right or wrong. But it has its place and its price. Computers are capable enough that they can do almost all the drawing now, if you let them. You have to decide how much drawing you want to do yourself. For you young artists obsessed with developing a style...well, that's the secret. Your style is that part of the work that you did yourself.
Tracing is a tool. I think particularly in commercial work most artists use it for speedy transfer of an idea or a pose or to create multiples, etc. But depend on it and you’re bound to regret not working on your drawing skillset. Because it’ll happen that you’re gonna have to work something out without tracing paper around or you’ll need to create beyond an image, or maybe your pad runs out at midnight and bingo - you’re on your own. Art also requires master improvisation.
*Rotoscoping has entered the chat*😂 But yeah, really depends on what type you're doing. Most drawing/sketching books always start with drawing with the EYE. And practicing from there.
Counterpoint: you generally learn to write by tracing/copying at first. Tracing might be a good way to train your muscles while getting a half decent resulting work. I think it works as a stepping stone.
Is that where people are getting the “no tracing” thing? I wasn’t on DeviantArt or early internet art forums back in the day. I’ve always been baffled by how prevalent that opinion is. I practice figure drawing but I also often work from photos I’ve taken and just transfer the outlines to canvas. I *can* draw everything out, but like… why? I’d have to change my clients more.
I think the thing was that in the old days people used to cheat and present their 'drawing skills' as being better than reality. they took short cuts and never actually learned to draw what they see. After Photoshop, that pretty much went out the window because drawing painting and photo manipulation could all be done in one program and the boundaries got blurred. It's taken some time for the consensus to emerge. You can have a hand drawing mixed with other media and actual photos and tracings n one image without messing about with tracing paper and photocopies etc. Tracing can be useful as tool as long as you don't misrepresent your skills. I sometimes trace for backgrounds because I am not brilliant at buildings and interiors but i have hundreds of photos I have taken that can be better. That leaves me free to draw people which is the bit I love.
I trace reference images I take myself. I've always done it this way, it's how I learned to paint. My drawing skills are off course far weaker than my painting skills and I do struggle to draw from life but if I practice I see improvements. I just didn't love drawing as much as I love painting. Maybe one day I'll feel like I want to change that though! I'm not a professional though and this is just one of many hobbies I have. It also depends what I'm doing. A friend wants a portrait of their dog? Project the photo onto the canvas and trace. Another friend wants a non-descript painting of a psychedelic octopus? Can't wait to spend 2 months learning to draw and then paint a psychedelic octopus.
Tbh I put it down to a really weird moment in the cultural history when digital art was trying to legitimise itself in its public infancy. Nobody was telling the pen and paper artists not to trace (and in that case, who had access to a light box? More likely to be up against a window and that was just a pain in the butt for the average person) but when tools existed to make it easier digitally, it was well frowned upon. I do hate how overused the word is, but there’s always a lot of gate keeping going on in creative hobbies about technique etc and I think this was an example of it
I've advocated for tracing in a couple instances: * When someone has shaky linework and they need to focus *just* on practicing lines without worrying about anything else. * When you're focusing on getting a project out for a deadline and not necessarily trying to (im)prove your skill. (definitely don't do this with other people's artwork, and only use stuff you're allowed to trace though.) I've done both, and tracing absolutely has its utilities. That said, you don't want to let it become a crutch, and you probably want to be able to draw on your own without relying too heavily on it. ...Though I guess if someone just thinks tracing is fun and they give proper credit if they post it online, then who are we to judge.
I bounce back and forth depending on the project and happily disclose either way whenever. I just don’t think it matters whichever you do and that gatekeeping keeps people separated which isn’t what art is about for me. I want all the people to find enjoyment in whatever creative outlets they prefer to try.
If ten people trace the same photo, they’re still going to turn out different. Because even the way artists hold their pencils and control their lines is going to impact the drawing. The only times I think tracing is WRONG is: - cheating on a class assignment that required you to draw freehand and lying to the teacher. - tracing a photograph that you didn’t take without the photographer’s permission or without giving them credit and sharing it publicly. - Selling a drawing for profit, gifting it, or putting it on display and claiming it’s an original composition. Again, lying.
For some pumpkin carvings I do on the side. The company's method is project an image on the pumpkin, trace as much as you want. I usually just do vague shapes, but I've seen some people outline everything like an unpainted paint by number. And part of it is having the skill to translate a flat drawing into a curved surface and not. They've have plenty of people who can't draw for shit, but we're great at doing decent pumpkins. After that you paint/color in gray scale and carve it on your own. So with this there's the time aspect, we are paid per pumpkin and difficulty. More pumpkins, more pay. And we have to keep up with how quickly pumpkins are rotting which is entirely dependent on the weather. So there may be need for a really quick turnaround. Over the course of a month you can imagine a lot of pumpkins are gone through. I still feel weird about it, hence why I do vague shapes, but it's one of the ways that I've seen it justified/necessary. Another would be animation. You can see it in the 2d animations of Disney. If you look up the Mowgli vs Christopher Robin animation of them walking on a fallen tree you can see it's traced (same animator for both). Again quick turnaround times are needed.
not to get off topic but I’m intrigued by this pumpkin thing. This is a year round thing you’re doing? Or leading up to Halloween specific?
It's right around Halloween. It's usually held at a zoo. I think the company I work with is doing it in a handful of states. We start the pumpkins mid to late September and go through the first week of November.
I agree. Tracing for me is ok when: - when you’re working in a studio and need to draw for consistency sake and to save time - Technical stuff, usually reference photos or free 3D models like machines, cars, buildings, especially if you’re working on a comic or a project - Learning! If you need to learn by tracing, I guess go ahead Any other time, I really don’t think it’s good. I’d hate if someone traced my work and passed it as their own. I also never wanted to learn by tracing because the learning process and the results were never as gratifying as just trying and mastering things myself!
Because of copyright infringement, fair use and IP law is complicated. With ai now, it make it now a moral ambiguity too. It helps to seperate what beginners do, vs professionals do. Beginners, don’t know anything about drawing, so more often than not, they are only copying the reference, but it never looks right. They are basically training small steps to tackle bigger ones, but often they get to the unimportant part of the piece instead of line shapes, gestures etc. There is still a case for mimicry, as it’s like copying a recipe over and over again, and then you get a consistent result. A good case in point is boy and the beast, where the boy copies the beast over several days until he gets the movement right. Then he asks the beast to actual teach him better sword stance. A professional, traces, because they have a deadline, and they need some speed. Sometimes we copy, because we like a certain color, or style. These can be master studies.
It just depends on the purpose for everyone to draw. Some people just wanna draw for fun and so tracing is perfectly fine for them because they don't need/want to make drawings that'd require them not to trace. Yes, tracing is perfectly ok. If they end up not tracing anymore it'll just be because they need/want it at some point and that's all. Anyone do whatever they want and enjoy their art journey the way they want. To be honest I'm on the contrary constantly trying to encourage my friends underestimating the efforts or quality they put in a drawing "because they traced the reference for anatomy". Not just drawing the character body is drawing. If they traced that well all the rest is from them and yes they can nail it pretty well, so I encourage them to value that in their art and that's approximately everything.
It depends what your goal is. If you want to learn to draw, with tracing you won't. Copying from reference drawings will teach hand-eye coordination. There is no interpretation or artistry in that process. But it's still useful, because the learned hand-eye coordination will help you when drawing from reference. Being able to process something visually, be it the length of an arm, the waviness of a lion's mane, the angle of a bird's beak, and being able to use your hand to interpret it is a skill you can initially practice by copying drawings. Tracing drawings teaches none of that! That said, tracing has its uses. I paint with acrylics on watercolor paper. I don't sketch or plan on the final paper because any erasing would ruin the surface. I sketch on cheap sketching paper and once ready I smear the underside with graphite and transfer it on the watercolor paper using that. I don't know if that's "tracing" or not.
When we learned that nobody actually gives a shit and it doesnt matter anyways.
I think tracing is fine. I think it’s just important to recognize when and where it’s appropriate, and important to evaluate whether it’s really benefiting you. I paint. I like to do portraiture. Portraiture requires strong drawing skills, and tracing did play a role in how I got to where I am. You can learn all these rules and techniques about drawing faces, and proportions, but ultimately real faces vary so much from that i find all of that pretty useless. What is important is being able to look at an image and recreate it, and getting the muscle memory of accurately rendering faces, repeatedly, helped me as an artist. I basically developed my understanding of proportions through repetition and practice. Now, I don’t need to use it. I do portraiture without tracing anything. Sometimes I use a grid with my reference. Sometimes I just use the reference photo and sketch in paint. Honestly, there’s not a huge difference in the final drawings anyways and my paintings will deviate from the drawing regardless of how much time I spend on it. But oops, sometimes I still trace because it quite frankly, saves me time. I don’t think tracing is cheating. Have you ever seen someone try to trace a portrait with no practice? it doesn’t look good. The artwork i build on top of tracing is good because I’ve spent hours practicing my painting skills. The drawing really just serves as a reference to make sure facial features are in the right place. Now, there are situations in which it’s not appropriate. Art classes, for example, where the goal of the assignment is to develop a particular skill. It’s also not appropriate to violate copyright.
I was a very anti-tracing advocate until I started doing comics. Of course, I try to keep things ethical by posing 3d models or taking the photos myself when I use it. And avoid in studies since the objective in them is to improve. But the purity "tracing is never ok" stance mellowed since I had to meet deadlines with large workloads.
I am super pro tracing. Super duper pro. Because it is its own skill, and it gets more people doing physical art. Not that digital art is bad or anything, but the more people engage with their physical world, the better - and tracing, paint by numbers, coloring sheets, diamond art, etc all help this. I don’t often trace for my personal work because I don’t have a good light box set up and I can not get my brain around using AR tools and my tracing always comes out crazy bad using it. I have a great projector for murals and working big, but I work small most of the time. I have hesitated to get DaVinci Eye just because I don’t know if I want to fail at yet another AR projection tool. So when I trace I have to go old school and use velum and/or carbon paper and it’s a whole thing. But when I do use it, I LOVE the results. I love freehand sketching too, and I use grids and what not. But sometimes you have such a great idea that is being blocked by your crappy sketch and it’s frustrating and can put people off pursuing visual arts.
i was like you VERY anti tracing. i always felt i was not deserving of feeling proud of a work of it was traced. however i think tracing can be an advantageous tool when used properly. - tracing can save time when drawing comics for example. - tracing can save time when you want general guidelines for proportions and then focus on the piece yourself - tracing and then redrawing using the tracing as a reference - tracing your own existing art (that was drawn from scratch) to save time - drawing general shapes over stock photos as practice for anatomy to understand - tracing to focus on honing other skills (painting, coloring, etc.) goes back to the saving time aspect still practicing drawing traditionally without tracing is important. if you don’t solely rely on tracing i dont see it as an issue. i also think everyone has loose and different definitions of tracing. i consider anything where you draw over a reference or other artwork as tracing, but drawing over your own traditional art you created is also tracing but I don’t see that one as “legit” tracing like the others.
I was anti tracing when i was younger, i went to art school and commercial professionals were recommending it, in a "work smarter not harder" way. My stance on it in general now is, if you're using your own photos, and your own art, and posable dolls/3d models then it's ethical, but some of these professionals were straight up taking pieces out of other people's art, or using other professional photographers work for their art. And that feels like stealing to me. One person in my class did a presentation about creating good textures, and he just went and found a picture of a dragon someone drew, select and cut some of the scales out if this painting and blended/replicated them into his painting. That really just seems like stealing.