2d Animation Tips - Tracing
This seems to be a sensitive topic for many people, but I’d like to make the case for tracing to be an important tool for learning. In fact, I think tracing is one of the most efficient ways you can learn not just to animate, but to learn to draw more generally. This is more of general advice for people starting out, rather than a tutorial.
If you want to learn to learn anything, you should start with the best. I found one of yoh yoshinari’s many animations of yoko. The movement is pretty solid, but where would you begin with understanding his thought process?
I think it’s best to kind of reverse engineer some major forms to see the general movement so I first traced it.
There’s quite a bit going on here. I tried to isolate the head movement
And made a line of movement
From here you can try to use the form of the head to see if you can reconstruct the original animation, but I just wanted to keep the line of movement to make things less derivative.
The movement is very rough and needs a bit of polishing and refining, but I think you can make it into a solid animation with a second or third pass.
The bigger question is, did I make something derivative? Yeah, in some sense it is derivative. It wasn’t directly traced, but I took the line of movement from Yoh’s animation. The better answer is: it doesn’t matter.. because it’s about you learning rather than showing it to people telling them how cool you are for tracing another artist.
There are a few things to be said here. If you are at a level where you can make solid animation with good composition ( and yes there is composition in animations just like there are in illustrations and movies), the dangers of making derivative work rise pretty quickly. Maybe there is a market and audience for people who can trace really well, but personally I don’t care for that and I assume others don’t care about that either. In other words: if you want to be known for your animations, you probably shouldn’t trace others.
Just to break the taboo a little more, there is a guy by the name of Drew Struzan. He is a professional movie poster illustrator, he made covers for star wars, indiana jones, and back to the future .. just to name a few. He uses a projector to trace people’s faces onto his posters. He does this to maximize his time for what would take him days or weeks to do by eye. Is there anything wrong with this? I feel like there isn’t, and the reason is because I feel movie posters’ main strength and appeal are their color choice and composition. There are people who get paid to capture someone’s likeness and, sure enough, that is a talent that you develop with time and skill. I just don’t think Drew is paid for how well he can make the faces look exact.
And just to touch on some of the drama of people tracing me, I don’t think it’s a big deal. There are people out there that think it’s ok to use my art for advertisements, and leak patreon stuff. It just doesn’t seem like a big deal to me if someone traced an animation.
Anyways, hope that is somewhat helpful.
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