#tracing

[ohnothehedgepog]

[justladders]

To everyone in the art community, please:

Tracing is effective. But only as a learning tool. Telling people "never trace" can be robbing them of methods that could have been effective to their learning process if they'd known about them.

The "art of using tracing" is a bit looked over, so I have five points:

(it's a long one)

1: AS A RULE OF THUMB, DO NOT POST/SHARE TRACED AND STOLEN ARTWORK. This is not only lying to anyone you show it to, if you're trying to come off as, "I'm so good, look at what I did," but most importantly, it's lying to yourself. You'll trick yourself into not needing to get any better, and you will stagnate if you start to rely on tracing as a form of stealing. If you come to realize that you are, you should stop using any tracing methods altogether to keep yourself from abusing it. It's a slippery slope for beginners, and a big reason why you’ll hear almost everyone echo that you just shouldn’t trace at all. The issue is that this ignores the ways that tracing can actually be good.

2: Tracing sets the stage for motor skills/hand-eye coordination. I've seen so many early-stage beginner artists get upset that the art that they make of their favorite character/oc is messy, or maybe they just don't even know what they want to draw and can’t "make themselves mindlessly doodle.” These early arists then become completely disheartened and upset, especially if they start to look at other people for comparison. Tracing over work or even over photos is a way to train your hand to hold and wield a pencil/stylus properly without you being worried about the finished product. Think of it like a way to dip your toe into learning the process of what making art feels like, without having to get overwhelmed with searching up pointers and people telling you, "10 quick tips to become a master artist!!!!!!!" (<- please ignore those) If you’re just beginning, your hand-eye coordination needs to be trained, and you shouldn't bog yourself down so much thinking about end products just yet, so if tracing is the way to get you started, go for it. If you're a bit more experienced, tracing and drawing over reference can also help you warm up without being committal or stressing your art brain too much.

3: Practice "mindful tracing." While I said the previous point was targeted more at beginners, this point is actually about something that experts in their field use. Doing "mindful tracing" over art means that you aren't worried about getting the lines "correct," you're studying why those lines are there. You're taking note of where the shadows meet the highlights based on the light source, how it shows off the forms, and how sharp or soft the lighting is; you're going over the lines of action in the piece to see how your eye is guided by the artist's intention and planning; you're seeing how characters may be stylized into shapes and the feeling that those shapes can give; you're noting how the artist uses line weight or weird blocks of color or stark breaks to split up the art or separate ideas within it; you're experiencing the flow of the poses within the artwork to grasp how that kind of thing feels; you're breaking down the overall composition like in a thumbnail sketch; and the list goes on.

"Mindful tracing" ends up looking like you've marked up an English essay: it should be messy, because the intent with it is not to copy or replicate, it's to notate. It's like how literally writing notes on things helps you remember better than if you only read it. You're acknowledging instead of just looking. And you can always learn, even from styles that you don't intend on actually using. As you get to be more experienced, you may come to realize that you can do "mindful tracing" analyses on artwork without having to literally write over top of the piece, which is great: that means you're improving your creative brain, and prepping it to be able to break down your own works in this way as you make them.

4: Trace for specific character or style studying. For this point, I want to especially stress that this is what makes everyone say, "don't trace," because this is what tracing is most commonly associated with: art theft. There's really no excusable reason to repost someone's art in this way.

I feel like you have to be a bit more experienced to properly use tracing specifically for style studies. The benefits that come with tracing a certain style is that it can quite literally teach your hand/brain to recognize the patterns that are present. You get a feel for how far apart a specific characters eyes are, how big their hands are, how the shapes of the body make up their form, how the exaggeration in the expressions feel, and when traced you know you have all of these proportions correct. This makes it so much easier to start drawing the specific character on your own if you know that you have a correct baseline (and of course you should still use reference from then on). When you study many different characters of the same style, you can start to grasp what actually makes up this style that you're studying, where -similar to point #3- you train your art brain to recognize the original artists' intentions and ideas. I would even argue that doing this is MORE IMPORTANT than using reference at the very beginning of a style study, because it makes you worry less about if you're pulling from the reference correctly and instead lets you focus on the original art by thinking through it during the process; this kind of thing is done by professionals. Although tracing can net you these benefits for studies, it is not a way to get around the rest of the learning process, which is the pitfall that normally ends up making tracing ineffective.

5: Lastly, I actually kind of lied about tracing "only being good as a learning tool." The other case where tracing gets used is within the process of making hand drawn animation, and I do mean the professional stuff. Model guides are constantly used in classic animation as reference to keep by the animator's side so that characters stay on model, but sometimes there are unnoticeable parts of a character that just get straight-up traced from either the model sheet or a different scene that's already animated. When used smartly and sparingly, this keeps the character on model, is unidentifiable to the audience, and takes up less time for the animators to work (and by "used smartly" I don't mean moments where characters blatantly have 5 seconds of reused animation). I can basically guarantee that this practice was done throughout the making of any 2D project you can think of.

In digital hand drawn art, key frames between points in an animation may get the "shift and trace" treatment, where the tween frame is just a smudged-around-version of the key frames until it looks about right, and then it get traced over. Backgrounds get traced all the time by artists in the professional field through modelling a 3D render of the space, going over it so they have the layout, and then painting on top of it. When drawing characters, people will take photos of themselves and trace the pose, then keep it to the side as reference. And this is all without even mentioning rotoscoping.

When people say, "don't trace," what they actually mean is, "don't trace as a substitute for experience."

The issue is that people blanketly state, "x thing is bad," because then people that aren't learned in the field go, "oh, okay, x thing is bad, it will always be bad, I shouldn't look into it or consider it any more, and I should correct/disgrace anyone that thinks otherwise or does x thing."

So please. Trace. Tell other people to trace. But remember: trace mindfully. :)

[sorosoro321]

Rewrite the Stars from the movie the Greatest Showman tracing

Finally passed 20 sec mark😭🥳

[elmushterri]

So it’s been brought to my attention that somebody’s traced my art!

This person on DA… who claims to have been born in 1985, making them 39 which I just do not believe, has traced my art from a single frame of my YouTube Video. I have no issue with someone making a PJ Masks AU similar to GunnTech as again, it’s a PJ Masks AU, not an original 😄. But upon… looking at it for one second, I realised it was traced from me. I took a look at their other art and that is not their style, very obviously.

Honestly, they did a good job on the background! I was going to do nothing about this from just reading about their AU (which, to be honest, is just GunnTech, but like I say, I don’t mind someone else doing what they want with that if they put it under its own name and such). But you can’t just trace someone’s art and call it a day, and then ALSO copy their concept. Not okay.

I don’t believe they’re actually 39 years old because that makes tracing art and positing it absolutely embarrassing! Very strange! I’m not mad as much as confused 😭😭.

This? That’s fine! Get inspired. But don’t trace my sketch and post it as your own. Weird, and wrong.

Of course, I’m not asking for personal attacks against them… my rightful ‘Not cool dude’ should probably be enough.

[sixbeee]

NIGHTSILVER PARODY 💨😈

[milesobrein]

HER

Guys she’s just so—agshdshshg. I had to draw Her. I’m gonna be completely honest, I did this picture as a way to practice my tracing and me embellishing it with drawing over said tracing, and using filters afterwards to get the colors just right, because I had to draw this Baddy Tonight. Goodnight and sweet dreams. 🌟

[meo-eiru]

Tracing is something all artists do, I also trace sometimes (like taking pictures of my own hand and tracing over them to understand how i can get the positions right) and even industry professionals do it.

When I was younger and had just started posting my art online I was really scared to trace over stuff thinking people would witch-hunt me for it, which just caused unnecessary stress. I would prefer my account to not be a space that can cause another person that type of stress.

That being said, of course tracing isn't fine all the time. That specific drawing was alright because it was from a very famous scene from a very famous movie, I don't want to put down an artist for something like that.

But it would've been a different story if they had traced over another artist like me or themselves without permission and posted it like that. I won't excuse my ocs and other people's art being used in such a way.

Feel free to trace as much as you want while studying, it'll help you in the long run. Just make sure it's only for studying.

[screampotato]

To prove my thesis that guinea pigs are, in fact, not real animals, but some kind of chibi keyring creature that accidentally came alive, I have produced a series of artworks by tracing over photos of my guinea pigs:

They are all the same two pigs, I've just recoloured them various ways for fun. And look at them. You see what I mean? Huge heads, tiny feet, button eyes, perfect potato bodies. These cannot be real animals. There was some sort of accident at the gacha factory.

I promise you, these are traced. These are genuine photographs of these living plushy toys in their natural poses. I simplified the outlines but I didn't change them or rescale them. This is just what guinea pigs are like.

Though honestly, I wouldn't blame you if you didn't believe the last one. The vet says he must take more exercise and honestly she has a point.

[kinsleygenesis]

SPYXFAMILY

[adorkastock]

Are you ok with people tracing hands? Everything else i can just reference, but I can’t get hands right. Can i trace them?

Everyone can trace anything I post. Tracing is just a tool. You can decide to use it or not use it based on your goals, skills, etc.

Tracing is morally neutral for learning and if you're working from appropriate resources (like my Creative Commons licensed stuff!) then it's morally neutral for all types of art making.

Make art, take care. ♥

[justladders]

I may ask, if you do a traditional drawing and pass it to digital by "tracing" it, is it good, bad or not even considered tracing?

Oh that's perfectly fine. Tracing over your own work was literally part of the process in making the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo made full-sized drawings, pin-pricked the outlines, then transferred the outlines onto the surface beneath by pressing charcoal dust into the tiny holes. He also did a thing that was more like "traditional tracing" where he just went over the art with what was basically just a sharp pencil and pressed hard enough that it transferred onto the plaster that was used. So like, are people gonna start discrediting the outcome?

There's a very stupid stigma around: “Dont trace in ANY WAY or you're not a real artist." Like guys. It scared anon into not wanting to move their own traditional work to digital 😭😭😭😭😭 PLEASE

[pepegle]

[kawaiialeisha]

❗My thoughts on tracing in the WH community!!!

I have seen little to absolutely nobody talk about how often people trace and I wanted to do it if nobody else was going to. I'm pretty nervous, but it has to be said.

This has no intention to attack anyone mentioned in this post.

TO THE MUTUALS IN THIS POST:

I am not here to offend you, and I am not mad at you. I am just saying that crediting is super important! Please do it when heavily referencing/tracing art!! /lh

I'm sorry for making a post like this as I usually tend not to. And I also hate doing this lmao. But I hope you understand!

[m3rcuryxd2763]

HELP SOMEONE TRACED SPOOKY...

[nictelsm]

The background could've been something erotic but thanks to the porn ban I can't put it there.

And ALSO thanks to the porn ban Tumblr has spread itself onto the entire internet therefore dooming us all

I think I screwed up with Spigot's head. Looks like it got steamroller'd