This also applies to my own art by the way. Like, if you want to study my art to improve yours and you feel like you are at a point in your learning process where tracing my work directly would be beneficial to you, you can do that - just credit me.
And this part is definitely subjective so I am saying this for ME and you should not assume it is true for any other artists unless you ask them directly for permission and they say yes: genuinely you can trace my whole drawing exactly or use it as a base to make your own oc drawing if that's where you're at in your learning process, if you credit me and acknowledge you traced it.
@ me on it if you post it, let people know you were copying my work. let ME know you were copying my work. I will respect that. I might even boost it. Unless you've done something WILDLY disrespectful with it, if you credit me I will just be happy that I have inspired you to make art. I expect this to be a training-wheels phase in your journey - someday I hope you will be more comfortable freehanding your work in fair use ways and transforming your references without directly copying anybody.
But there is nothing dirty about doing that to learn if you are honest about what you're doing and not trying to pass off somebody else's work as your own because you want to appear to be more technically advanced than you are. We can still tell when you traced, and as my idol @nevarroes pointed out in the tags, so does the artist you traced from.
If you're just trying in earnest to learn and improve your art and you want to share it even though you had to do it with the tracing training wheels on, if you're copying someone's work because you respect it and find it inspiring and you want to learn something from it that will help you figure out your style that you're trying to develop toward, then you should want to be respectful toward that artist by crediting them.
And while I personally think that doing that in the first place is something you should be able to do, and posting your traced art should be fine, as long as proper credit is given - while I personally don't think you have to go ask permission to study someone's work in the first place - I do think if they express discomfort with it you should politely be respectful of that.
I think it should be fine to study each other's work in order to develop if you are just earnestly trying to get better on your own, I don't think you have to ask permission, but directly copying does demand directly crediting. And that's in a perfect world, but we live in an imperfect one: I think it should be fine to do this without asking permission first, but i don't make the rules and I respect that other artists may disagree, so that's why I said up top in this reblog addition that I recommend asking other artists permission first before tracing their work for study but I'm fine with you just taking blanket permission when it comes to my own work.
And if the artist says to stop or asks you to take it down, while I don't necessarily agree with that request if you acknowledged what you were doing and gave credit, I think it is still the correct and polite thing to respect the request anyway.
Nobody should have to reinvent the wheel to learn art, and I'm just glad if you're still drawing. But if your ultimate goal is to be respected as a peer among artists, you need to give credit where it's due.
