I figure what the hell I’ll make this thing right now before I forget, haha. Odds are if you’ve followed me on my amazing escapades through the internet for at least a year you’ve heard me go on this tirade once or twice already, but here we go again!

There’s nothing inherently bad about tracing to learn. The stigma attached to tracing is mostly at the fault of kids or really dumb people who think they can get away with tracing something and then claiming it as entirely their own work. At that point it’s just flat out theft. They’re claiming someone else’s ideas as their own.

Once upon a time I was a kiddie who had a book of pokeymans that had tracing paper included in it. I traced the hell out of those pokeymans and would color ‘em and hang them on my fridge (haha I typed friend that’s hilarious) but they never really felt like my work, ‘cause it wasn’t. Sure I dragged the pencil along the paper, but I was still copying what someone else did. So, there’s a difference in tracing to just to trace and tracing to learn.

In my recent post with the Posemaniacs models, I was tracing to learn. Rather than simply following the contours of the models and the muscles shown on them, I searched out the skeletons. I observed how everything was attached, where it fell in relation to something else on the body. I traced over muscles to try to teach my eye and my hand the shape of them. It was 90% observation and 10% scribbling.

Normally it’s safest to just keep traces to yourself. That way, nobody can accuse you of stealing or whatever. I like posting something like this every now and then ‘cause I know I have at least a few followers who like seeing my processes, whether it be for finished work or just learning. In the event you want to post something like that, your best bet is to cite your sources and make sure people know “Hey, I traced this to learn and teach myself some things, I take no credit for xyz.”

So yeah! That’s my view on tracing.