Tracing isn’t always bad! Tracing a image completely, not understanding the depth and just tracing the lines, personally, yeah, that’s bad. Especially of it’s another drawing. But I think that blocking out the shapes of a reference by traceing and drawing the shapes directly on it can help more than freehand sometimes, because sometimes blocking out the shapes by eye alone is hard. I typically only do this to block out a pose of a reference, and then draw the rest myself. But I am tired of people telling me I am cheating.
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True. Even Da Vinci used a wooden frame with a grid of threads or wires, which he would look through with one eye closed to transfer shapes to the canvas more accurately.
This is kinda similar to tracing.
I honestly think there is no cheating in art. Even full replication of art is an art form in itself.
This extends to things like music. Fuck copyright laws, they’re the death of art.
Tracing is a process. Process is not bad but the use of it can be.
No one talks about tracing anymore. We don’t care. Ai is the only thing we care about now
Tracing isn’t bad no, tracing is a tool like any other, it’s just how it’s used, it can give a different vibe to the art than hand drawn.
The only real problem I got with tracing is when you traice others art, and then sell it like it’s your own, that is not okay.
But as long as it’s used in a good way it can be fine.
Tracing always good as part of practice
I think when people think of tracing, they think of using it as a crutch when drawing all the time instead of learning fundamentals.
Well it depends. A lot of techniques use tracing in the process (rotoscoping, photorealism etc.). The main factor is how transformative the work is to the original reference and how transparent the artist is with the intent of creating it. Let’s say you traced to make a shittier, slightly different variation of the original artwork then trying to sell it as your own with no citation then it’s bad and immoral.
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I haven’t picked up a pencil or a paintbrush in years due to restrictions I put on myself and then I got bored. If this is what you need to stay in your creative flow, then it’s worth it. It’s so much better than not doing anything