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OneFreeInternet — So you think tracing can't help you learn?
Published: 2009-09-26 14:45:24 +0000 UTC; Views: 19323; Favourites: 66; Downloads: 0
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Gallery | DD's I've given | Favorite DD's of All Time | Note Me | contact me:::crystal_jemm@hotmail.com | Visit me on LIVESTREAM
Watch me show you that it can.
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. 
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 
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!
Mini-gallery code from foundsoundfunny , thank you!
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Comments: 323
I tell people to trace all the time. It's how I learned to draw. Unfortunately for me, I traced the WRONG things! Comic art... So I was learning the worst kind of anatomy, and, distorting stuff, and my proportions are well... Let's not get into that. But the fact is, that tracing DOES work. I recommend it all the time to people that are learning to draw. After a while though, I do tell them too stop drawing and begin eyeballing as I do think that will allow them to learn to gauge and properly measure from life. I mean, you can't walk up to someone in Starbucks and make them stand there to trace them... Besides, the paper is too small. So in otherwords, I fully agree with Crystal here. Good lookin out!
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Most constructive comment on dA's tracingsociety so far.
I've considered tracers a condemned minority, cuz I didnt think
that they'd learn sth or could use the trace as a base for acutally new art.
@w@ eyes opened.
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I used gridding for a self-portrait.
I turned out awesome.
THE method for keepig proportions!
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if i would have never traced when i was younger i would have never had the confidence to keep going
letting me see what i could do with someone elses work made me want to not trace and get better..
when i first got photo shop i did the same thing
i took images and would use them as guidelines to get to know the program
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I could have told you that LOL... Tracing photos when you are starting out teaches your hand how to comfortably make those motions. You have to try not to become too dependent on it though.
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FUCK THANK YOU.
DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I TRY TO TELL PEOPLE THIS AND PEOPLE GO ON CRYING RAGES?!?!
"TRACING DOESNT HELP. ITS BULLSHIT BLAH BLAH BLAH KINDERGARDEN BLAH BLAH"
God I love you ;w;
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I know that I'm not that good of an artist, however, tracing is what got me started. I couldn't learn to draw no matter what I did until I started tracing. Thats when I learned HOW to draw a lot of things.
About one year before I joined dA, that's when I started drawing by using references instead of tracing them, and I've been doing that ever since for the most part.
It's not wrong to trace if it's for a learning experience, as long as you don't post it and brag about how you did. Sometimes, people need to learn from an example.
I've actually been looking for something that sparks my interest in drawing again, I've run out of ideas, probably because there's nothing happening in my life. But... I want to be able to draw again for fun, that's what I'm truly aiming for.
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I did the same thing with Poser for a while. It helped a lot, though in time I came to learn how static Poser models are.
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hmmm that can be true. I guess after the tracing period is over, people can make up their own dynamic poses after they get a feel for how the body flows and moves naturally
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Totally. Tracing is really a great step toward learning the human figure -- or a large number of other drawing techniques, too
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Gridding > Tracing
Here's the reason why:
Obviously, tracing from photos really helps and I recommend the method you use completely (coupled, of course, with drawing from life).
However, the reason why I say gridding is the best is because through gridding, you learn more about being able to see shapes instead of the actual object. I personally believe seeing shapes not only helps in better accuracy, but helps the transition from realism to stylized become a lot smoother.
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Okay. I never used gridding because I have never tried it so I honestly have no real response to that.
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I completely support your journal.
I had a feeling you wouldn't. I did it on purpose. I'm sowwy, I wanted to be speshul.
Nevertheless, try gridding and using a gridded viewfinder when drawing from life. It's fun.
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Interesting technique that gridding is.
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It can be fun. Some (if not all) of the best celebrity pencil and digital portraits on here are done using gridding.
This artist [link ] does it beautifully.
I haven't done it for a long time, though. Not because I look down at tracing or gridding, but because after a while you don't feel the need to do it anymore.
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Awesome. o_0 I'ma try it. >:
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Interesting! I just told someone last night that he could learn from tracing, just as long as he never posted any of this tracings and claimed it as his own. I've done it recently on some things that I just don't draw in order to help me learn proportions. Like animals...ahh! Although this particular guy I told also needs to learn basics if he wants to get any better. It should all be used together, and as `Rahll said, then you graduate and move on. <33
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Can we get married now?!
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Crystal is an artist, she does the arts!
No, but seriously, I think you just inspired me to start drawing again xD
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I DEMAND MORE ART BY STOVE!
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I didn't read all of it, don't have enough time, but I got the gist of it by looking at the pictures and skimming.
Tons of artists, usually kids at a young age, start by doing little doodles and tracing things. Then you graduate from that and move onto bigger things.
But the thing is, the merits of tracing aren't gone. They can certainly teach you. And on top of that, illustrators use tracing paper constantly to trace their own drawings to rework and fix them, or to be able to get a complex object that they don't have the time to draw manually due to deadlines.
There are all sorts of legitimate applications for tracing. The only time it becomes fraudulent or worthy of ridicule is when someone lies about their technique.
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totally agreed, nothing much needs to be added to that!
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D8 I turn my back for one second on that damn horse --
Epic journal. I had been sort of on the fence in a "sometimes" manner, and I fell off to your side xD I agree, especially since I did something similar to you the other day. I was failing sooo much at drawing two people together that I traced out their bodies and altered them as I wanted. It really helped me too, because now I figured out how two intertwined people fit!
It's a shame people abuse tracing so that is doesn't help them, because it really is a good learning tool when used properly
/ramble
Need to go find my horse now. He wasn't high or anything, he was just an itty-bitty pony D|
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Yup, that is it exactly. It's one of those things used in such a bad light so frequently that people assume it's always bad when it's not C:
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I see what you're getting at. I'm willing to actually try that out... but I'll need clearer paper since I do traditional sketches. :'D Don't know if it can work that way...
I don't mind tracing as a learning mechanism this way, I hate it when people trace cartoon characters, or... trace something and morph it into their character and don't give credit.
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you can do it on computer <:!
Stealing art concepts and images and passing it off for your own is wrong, no doubt D:
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:'D I'm so horrible with drawing with my tablet, I can only color. But I print out stock photos all the time so I guess I can just enlarge some to work with pencil.
Oh, yes. Which is what a lot of people tend to do. A lot don't trace to learn, they just learn to trace. >:
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Oh I'm horrible with drawing at it too, it takes me much practice to maneuver it properly at all.
LOL I love your last line. Trace to learn, don't learn to trace.
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I'll have to see if it works out then. :'D Might as well try.
Haha, came off the top of my head, sounded kinda spiffy.
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