So you think tracing can't help you learn?

First of all, before reading this, step off of those high horses of yours and open your mind to what I'm saying.

Are you off? Safe and unsaddled? Not tied up in the bridle? Good!

Before I start talking about tracing let me give you a bit of background information on myself. Me? I'm a very arrogant person sometimes. I often believe my way is right and always will be right, even if it's dead wrong. No matter what other people say to me, a lot of the time I have to realize the truth myself before believing it. As for my beliefs on tracing - I never really cared about if other people traced or not. It never got me mad nor did I care to report it on this site because I thought people would just make themselves look stupid doing so.

Recently I have been hating my art furiously (hence the empty gallery) so I sat for a while a couple nights ago and wondered WHY. Why do I feel my art is so amateur, and lacking, and underdeveloped for my age?

I found out the answer. My coloring is okay, I've never had any real problems with it. My drawing STINKS however. It really really stinks. Then I browsed around and realized that I wasn't the only one with this overdeveloped coloring and underdeveloped drawing skill. I saw many people with beautiful sense of color, depth, volume, yet when you remove all those fancy colors and look at the lines, they might as well be drawn by someone ten years younger than they're supposed to be. Some people even have PERFECT inking and lineart in itself but the anatomy.. Christ. Most distorted and nonsensical things I have ever seen.

The question is, how do sucky drawers such as myself remedy this? One answer is tracing.

Now before you go OMG HOW CAN CTJEMM SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT SO IS ALL HER ART TRACED OMG TRACING IS FOR PEOPLE WHO CANT DRAW AND BABIES OMG -- relax, breathe and read on.

Tracing is a learning mechanism. Plagarizing art by tracing anime screenshots, or even other people's art and posting it as your own is NOT what I am talking about. Push that element of it out of your mind and never go back to it again, it is NOT what I am referring to, and totally out of the question.

I mean tracing out of real life. Eyeballing will not help as much as tracing does, not in this case.

The first thing you must realize - People all use references.

If you ever say that "I never use references, ever!" - then frankly you're being an idiot. Even if you don't have a physical reference or picture in front of you, you imagine the shape and look of things in your mind. In your mind where do you think that comes from? It comes from memory. Memory of what? Nature. You use nature as a reference, you use real life and things around you to refer to when you draw. Still think you don't use references? If so it's okay, I had my moment like you too where I thought I was ttly original and amazings too dawg.

Now back onto tracing. Lately I've started taking stock photos and photography I find online and collecting them so I can trace them. No, I haven't posted any of these to dA, they are simply practise and are not (well not in my opinion) any kind of art fit for posting. Now I'll show you what I do with these photos. I've asked Whimsical-Dreams and vastblue for help in this little journal, and she's given me permission to use one of her beautiful photos as an example The photo by vastblue I will do this again with and post it as a deviation later. Much thanks to you, lovelies. <3

So I saved the picture and started tracing away. She has a very lovely body with epic proportions so it's a good example for practise.

See how useful it is to study by tracing for yourself.

1: I took the image into painter. I faded it so I could see what I'm doing, and traced the general silhouette of her body on a new layer. Yes, traced, not eyeballed. Eyeballing will just make me automatically distort the proportions prematurely because my perception of this photo is not how it literally IS. This is not what I want, so I TRACE it.



2: Now that I have the silhouette, this is where the learning starts. How many of you know about head proportions? It's a very important part of anatomy, and distorting proportions properly is only possible if you know how they go in the first place. This is what I have biggest problems with. From the trace, I learned these things.

• Whimsical-Dreams's body can very well be a standard cartoon adult body. She is 8 and a half to 9 heads tall.
• On the 9 head tall body, the shoulder lies at 1 and a half heads.
• the breasts will range from two to two and a half heads high (from the crown of her head)
• The waist lies at 3 and a half heads.
• The hips lie at 4 heads
• The crotch lies at 4 1/2 heads to 4 3/4 heads.
• The arms when hanging down reach 5 heads.
• The knees lay at 6 1/2 heads.
• The upper arm reaches 3 1/4 heads, and
• the nose ends at halfway through her first head.

Still hate tracing with a burning passion? No worries. Read on, read on.



3: I have a basic body to work with. But let's say you don't feel like this picture is fully yours yet, as you just 'ripped' a pose off of some photo (despite how much you just learned. ) Okay so for some reason, let's change the pose. It's easier to change the pose more accurately now because we have the body shape DIRECTLY under. It's your boundaries, your guide. Eyeballing cannot compare to this type of tracing because remember I said that your perception can mislead you. To avoid that, keep your guide directly in your sight.

So using that guide we just made, I drew my own pose. I moved the limbs, now that I have the correct proportions to work with, I can also distort them. Let's say I want to make a cartoon character. Character design in cartoons identify the feminine very unrealistically but no matter. Let's give her narrower shoulders, a longer yet narrower torso and bigger, more spread facial features.



4: Now that you have YOUR pose with YOUR proportions, most of all, correctly made (somewhat), You can even draw some slutty-looking animu chick with it. w@




So anyway with all this rambling my point is that tracing is not all fire and brimstone like people especially on deviantart make it out to be. I understand, tracing has a bad stigma because of how it's non-constructively used, and people associate tracing with not learning anything, and attention whoring and whatnot. But it is not all that. It doesn't have to be that at all. You can use any method to learn and I had to learn (the hard way) that tracing benefits people more than they're willing to admit. So with a little humility and change of mentality that you're too 'awesome', 'advanced' and 'too old' to trace, I hope this changes your mind. I've been drawing for years, I'm familiar with anatomy. But it needs serious improvement and tracing is helping me so much in filling in the gaps that remain. It helps, and it works. I'll continue using this mechanism to learn, because it's amazing. Personally I don't think it makes sense to trace from other illustrations, since they are already distorted in someone else's style. I don't think I can learn anything from that, as I just have a bunch of broken rules to work with. Real people, buildings, cars, and animals will help.

So next time you see someone tracing to learn, instead of flaming them to kingdom come, yelling, screaming and biting at them, why not suggest a better way to trace? Or show them how it can help them learn to make their own work instead? Community is not about hurting people and witch-hunting people off of dA if you don't agree with their methods, it means a lot more than that.

You can get back up on your high hors- whoops! it ran away!