A guide to ‘tracing’ while drawing
I’ve seen some people recently talk about tracing art, how it can help improve drawing ability, and obviously, art theft.
First things first. You should never, ever claim someone else’s artwork as your own. Similarly, you shouldnt just trace over someone else’s artwork and say it’s your own. However, minimal tracing CAN be helpful in learning how to draw.
There are three types of learning. Audio (learning from listening), visual (learning from watching) and kinetic (learning from doing). In a classroom setting, an example of all three would be having a presentation on a screen, with your teacher reading everything while you take notes. The audio learners are learning most from listening to their teacher talk. The visual are learning from reading what’s on the screen, and the kinetic are learning from taking notes. I bring all this up, because tracing, the act of drawing the individual lines and strokes, can be very helpful to kinetic learners.
With all this said, even though I am favour of this method, I suggest minimalist tracing, and I have some examples I’ve whipped up here. While I don’t really have a need to draw this way anymore, this is what I focused on for a while when I really wanted to work on my proportions, and sometimes it’s still helpful for complicated poses.
Here’s a random photo of a woman I found on shutterstock. If you are going to learn through tracing, let’s start by saying I think you should always use real life photos. I consider my own style to be fairly, well, stylised and not entirely realistic, but even if this is the case you should use real photos to learn and understand realistic proportions.
As I said, minimalist tracing. I’ve only taken the basic shape of her head and the locations of her eyes, nose, mouth. If you were to use something like an anime face, you’re likely to end up learning very odd shapes and positions for features.
Next, I start refining it more in my own style, using the original traced sketch as a guideline of where things should be.
The shape of the face is changed a bit to be more heart-like and the head is smaller, the eyes bigger, the nose smaller. I drew a new mouth. For my own style, the face overall was lowered a bit.
And there you have it. Had I drawn a whole body, you’d see a lot bigger difference in the overlay, but the point remains. It’s not a 1:1 copy, I’ve used the original image more as a guideline.
Again, never simply copy/draw over someone else’s artwork and claim it as you’re own. That is not helpful tracing, that’s just theft. If you’re using this method I’ve shown here, try to only trace what you need to, and do as much as you can yourself- it’s good practice, it will encourage you to memorise the general placement of features that you want to learn.
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