#tracing

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."