Lucky

I trace reference images for some of my art, yes, and I’m happy to talk about it, and the reason that I do it. If you read till the end, I even have example images.

I only trace photographs and movie stills, never the art of others, because tracing someone else’s art would feel wrong to me, and because the hard part for me is the actual likeness of the subject, not the idea or the composition.

This is because I have a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. It means that faces are extremely hard for me to remember, recognize, or tell apart, because I lack the specialization in my brain that a typical human has for parsing and remembering faces. (For a more extreme case than mine, see The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by neurologist Oliver Sacks)

Because of this, the face is always the hardest part to draw, and I actually have to ask others if the face I am drawing is recognizable, and what it is still missing. And every angle of a face feels like a whole new face to learn, because I don’t have a 3D “concept” of the face in my brain, even though I spend all my days staring at these specific faces.

Fun fact — sometimes the only way I can know for sure that a picture depicts Ryan Gosling is the little birthmark on his cheek next to his left eye, because it’s unique enough to combine with other clues to differentiate.

At first drawing Ryan Gosling’s characters felt overwhelming and difficult to do, because I had to produce a recognizable face of a specific character, and Goose’s face is particularly tricky to nail correctly.

Despite this, I decided to use tracing as a way to slowly practice and learn his face, and it has actually helped me draw more confidently when I freehand too! So I kept going, and it brought me such joy. It’s still very difficult, I need to use lots of references and most poses are beyond my abilities, but it brings me such joy that I just focus on the happiness it brings.

The tracing and level of references makes these feel more like technical practice exercises than actual art, but I’ve told myself that I should just keep doing whatever keeps me drawing, even though I have training wheels on, because I still learn something new every time.

As time has gone by I’ve freehanded now and then — some examples of my freehand work, (so in other words, art that is not traced) off the top of my head, are the drawing of Driver’s eye, the Henry doodle for Graey, (not the older Henry picture, that’s traced) the Luke Glanton portrait, the Holland March 4th of July BBQ art, and my two latest quick sketches (Driver and K on the beach and the 14th anniversary cartoon).

I’m always open to sharing when a picture has been traced, because I’m so proud of when I’m able to draw something freehand, and I want to help destigmatize this for other fan artists.

I’ve got an example below where I show the reference image, the actual trace of the image that acts as the “bridge” to map the features of the face for me, and then the finished fanart, where I’ve added weeks of work on top of the traced outline, where I still used the photo for reference, but it’s no longer traced.

You can see how rudimentary the face was at the traced stage, but it was still necessary to help me conceptualize it. The traced part of the eye was just two v-shaped squiggles, but over several days I drew it into a full eye under my own steam, and added all the other details of the face as well, making it slightly more stylized.

In this particular case I had to invent most of the bare upper body from scratch, since the reference image has a shirt, and re-draped how the jacket bunched so the scorpion could be more visible.

Thanks for the question, Anon!

Hi Anon, thanks for the ask! I use an old Surface Pro 3 (it’s almost 10 years old) tablet/laptop hybrid with a slightly newer Surface Pen, in the Poppy Red color.

The program I use to draw is called Sketchbook. It used to be called Autodesk Sketchbook, but now it’s just Sketchbook, and I have the Pro version. The basic version is free, if you want to check it out. (It also has a phone app version if you prefer to draw on your phone.)

Thank you Graey! This made MY day! Here, have a Henry doodle, it’s just a quick warmup sketch but I hope you like it!

Thanks for the lovely ask Mushu!

In honor of Autistic Pride Day (which is also today) I’m going to say that I wish we had a holiday called Special Interest Day. Just imagine it: Instead of having to make it about your age or the same thing as everyone else, you could share your favorite special interest, maybe even dress in something about your hyperfocus, and others could ask you about it, send you little memes about it, whatever felt fun. If you were close enough to someone to exchange gifts about it, they would all be on theme. Infodumps ALLLL DAYYYY.