Cool Drawings to Trace Over
Can tracing help you develop your drawing skills?
Learning to draw well is hard. Information technology can accept years of practice and good instruction and fifty-fifty then, there are no guarantees. We brand sure our students understand this before they begin learning with us, and most are eager to accept the claiming. Only in one case in a while, someone will signal out an obvious alternative. Information technology usually goes something like this:
"Omg, why don't yous just trace a photo instead? That'due south what I exercise, and information technology's mode easier! Lol!"
It's easy to dismiss this kind of response every bit naive or just somebody trolling. Only if y'all're interested in cartoon by ascertainment without tracing, it's a question you should be able to answer. If drawing is so difficult, why not just trace?
This is not a new question. It's been speculated that artists throughout history, including Norman Rockwell, Thomas Eakins, Johannes Vermeer, and even artists from every bit far back as the 1400s, have incorporated tracing into their cartoon process. These artists used lens devices to help them meliorate understand and capture what they saw, yielding some of the world's neat masterpieces. Today, the do of tracing photographs has proliferated throughout the representational art world as a quick and user-friendly alternative to the challenges of drawing well.
Then, if lots of artists are doing it, and have been for centuries, tin tracing really exist that bad?
If you're familiar with what nosotros do here at Vitruvian Studio, you lot already know that we prefer to draw by direct observation informed by measurement, without the aid of tracing or grids. There are, however, some legitimate uses of tracing when learning to describe, if simply in a few specific contexts. In this post, nosotros'll tackle the tracing issue head-on, and look at the pros and cons of tracing as a learning tool. Can tracing exist used to teach you the fundamentals of drawing or volition it foreclose you from reaching your total potential? You exist the guess.
What Can You Learn Near Drawing Past Tracing?
Do good #1: Tracing Can Help Y'all Get Accepted to Drawing Processes and Materials
If yous're just starting to learn, the deed of drawing can seem overwhelming. Something as elementary every bit holding a pencil and moving it appropriately on the page can be difficult and frustrating. Tracing an paradigm can help you focus on the physical demands of cartoon without worrying about whether you're getting it right. Information technology tin can help y'all develop hand-eye coordination and muscle retentiveness that are important for controlling the materials of drawing. Information technology's similar a kind of rehearsal for your future drawing evolution.
This kind of exercise is also useful for learning to brand decisions in the kickoff stage of cartoon. Nosotros typically begin by "blocking-in" the major masses of the subject with simplified, straight-sided shapes. Students sometimes struggle with this concept. Typically, nosotros try to include too much detail early on on. Tracing references is a convenient, inexpensive fashion to practice blocking-in. By tracing along the longest, broadest sweeps of the contour, you tin acquire what to ignore when establishing the biggest shapes.
It'southward of import, even so, to use the pencil in the same way that you lot volition when yous're not tracing. When drawing "freehand", we tend to outset with light, soft and temporary lines while we become our bearings. Tracings, however, tend to yield a sharper, harder and continuous line that results in a flat and cartoonish await. If you trace to get used to the deed of cartoon, effort to do it as if you're not tracing.
Benefit #2: Tracing Can Help You Understand Anatomy and Construction
An instructor at the New York Academy of Art would sometime prescribe a tracing exercise. For those of us struggling to draw the figure, he would photocopy a principal drawing and tell us to trace it. He told u.s. to pay particular attention to the curvature of the contour. Detect where information technology is more rounded, where it is flatter, and where information technology overlaps other contours. Consider the anatomy of the figure while you practise this and try to sympathize why the profile changes the style it does. Fifty-fifty depict the bones and muscles and endeavor to relate them to what's happening on the surface. And so, in one case the tracing is complete, draw the effigy again – but freehand this time, and at a larger scale.
This do packs a one-ii punch. Tracing an instance helps you learn well-nigh how a master artist represented the man figure. It focuses your attending in a way that merely looking doesn't quite accomplish. It's the visual equivalent of reading aloud while studying for a test. Reproducing that drawing at a larger calibration provides an opportunity to practice, and also demands more input from yous. Since a larger drawing volition require more description than you can see conspicuously in the smaller reference, you'll demand to improvise a little.
This kind of tracing practice provides a way of closely studying another artist'southward piece of work, and squaring information technology with your own knowledge and power. It's an effective fashion to discover what you demand to work on when learning to draw the effigy from ascertainment, or even from imagination.
Benefit #3: Tracing Can Assistance You Empathize Foreshortening
"Foreshortening" is the word we use to depict how an object looks when viewed on end. For example, if you were cartoon a figure with an arm stretched out toward you, it would announced "foreshortened". We typically struggle with foreshortening because the outer shape of the object we're drawing is non what we look. We think of limbs as being long and skinny and tend to draw them that way, even when they appear quite different in a foreshortened view.
Tracing tin can be an constructive way to study the effects of foreshortening. Try drawing an "envelope", or a rudimentary block-in, on top of existing images of figures in diverse foreshortened views. Doing so can starkly illustrate the difference betwixt our expectations (limbs are long and skinny) and what we're actually seeing. This kind of tracing tin help gratis you lot from your preconceived, and incorrect, assumptions well-nigh what figures look like.
Do good #4: Tracing Can Help You Sympathise Linear Perspective
Linear Perspective is a challenging subject for students learning to describe. Information technology often involves measurement and calculation and can seem a niggling too much like math. Just having at least a basic understanding of how perspective works is of import for conveying 3-dimensional space in drawings.
Tracing images can exist an constructive fashion to explore how vanishing points work in perspective. A "vanishing point" is the hypothetical spot where parallel edges receding away from the viewer appear to converge. Whatever 2 or more than parallel elements in a picture that recede dorsum and away from the viewer will share a common vanishing point. Students are frequently skeptical of this principle when drawing from life. Our brains just aren't wired to notice things like this. Merely tracing on height of a photograph to run into where receding parallels intersect tin provide disarming evidence that vanishing points are real and should be taken seriously when cartoon. [bctt tweet="Can tracing teach yous the fundamentals of drawing or will it prevent you from reaching your full potential?" username="vitruvianstudio"]
The Pitfalls of Tracing
All of these instances show how tracing can provide an effective fashion to acquire specific skills or concepts when learning to draw. But besides much tracing can hinder your development. Here are some reasons why:
Pitfall #1: Tracing Doesn't Encourage You to Analyze Your Work
Drawing well is ultimately most making skilful decisions. It'south about observing your subject advisedly, understanding why it looks the way information technology does and recreating that appearance on the folio with an effective method. A successful drawing is the product of analysis.
But tracing is oft washed mindlessly, with no analysis at all. Tracing doesn't require you lot to study your subject or examine your choices. If you're only copying lines, you don't have to ask questions or solve problems. When you trace, practice you consider the light source? Exercise y'all think virtually where the shadows are? Do you think about the underlying structure of your subject? Are yous thinking about perspective? Practice you plan your composition? Do yous consider alternatives to how the image you lot're tracing presents the subject? The answer to these questions is commonly "no". In other words, when you trace you probably don't truly understand what y'all're drawing, or why you lot're drawing it that way. In our opinion, this diminishes the overall drawing experience.
Pitfall #2: Tracing Can Result in Flat Drawings
Newspaper is flat. But when drawing observationally, we normally seek to create the illusion of volume and space on the page. In other words, we desire our drawings to appear 3-dimensional. Achieving this kind of illusion requires y'all to think in a particular way about what and how yous're drawing, considering carefully the various iii-dimensional characteristics of your subject.
When most people trace, all the same, it ordinarily results in a very flat, cartoonish drawing. The trend is to trace contours with a continuous, unbroken outline that appears to sit uniformly on the same plane – like a chalk outline at a crime scene. Even if the shapes are basically right, it tin can exist needlessly difficult to make such a flat-looking drawing appear three-dimensional and lifelike in the end.
Pitfall #3: Tracing Tin can Go a Crutch
Tracing is i thing, but cartoon freehand is something else entirely. Existence practiced at 1 doesn't automatically mean that you'll be good at the other. If you lot're non careful, y'all may observe yourself clinging to tracing because y'all're afraid to try drawing without information technology – or maybe you exercise try, and the results are disappointing, and you go back to what feels amend.
Merely there'southward no need to be afraid of drawing from observation. While learning to depict freehand is challenging, and will definitely push you out of your comfort zone, it will as well empower you. Just like whatever skill, in that location are many small steps to take forth the way, each of which provides its own advantage.
Pitfall #4: Tracing Doesn't Guarantee Skilful Results Anyhow
We alive in a photographic age. Every day, we are bombarded with hundreds of images that are derived from some type of lens device, and we tend to accept them every bit truthful. This is a land of heed known as being "camera conditioned".
But photographs aren't truthful. Instead, they misconstrue reality in countless subtle ways. Lens effects, exposure settings, compression artifacts, software biases and more than can accept a dramatic bear on on how whatever photograph appears to us. However we still oft betoken to photographs as the ultimate manifestation of accuracy in imagery. "Wow! That drawing looks simply like a photograph!"
Tracing a photo may seem like the quickest route to accurateness in drawing, simply if that'southward how you approach it, the distortions yous fail to notice in your photo reference will acquit over into your artwork. That, combined with the tendency mentioned above to trace simplistically, in a 2-dimensional way, can yield some pretty weird looking results. This can be quite discouraging, especially considering that tracing is supposed to be easy.
Check out our Drawing Basics class to acquire your primal drawing skill set.
Pitfall #v: Tracing Doesn't Convey Your Unique Point of View
The final argument against tracing concerns who is actually in control of your artwork. Part of what makes cartoon by observation hard is the sheer number of decisions you take to make while developing a drawing from start to finish. The relative success of your work depends to a large extent on how you cull to solve problems every bit they ascend.
Merely this is also what makes drawing interesting and incessantly variable. Put x master artists in a studio together, all drawing the aforementioned affair, and you lot'll see 10 different results. Each drawing will capture the discipline faithfully, and yet each one will be unique because it is the product of an individual mind. Each artist will choose his or her ain way to tackle whatsoever given problem, yielding different results. This is how individuality tin shine through in artwork, even in the context of strict realism.
When yous trace your work there is a huge number of decisions that you don't get to make. Things similar scale, placement, proportion, construction, and perspective in your drawing are all determined by whatsoever image you're tracing. With so many decisions fabricated for y'all, you don't become to discover out what your drawing would wait like if you lot were to work those things out for yourself. In this way, tracing is restrictive. Instead of sharing what you see in your own unique way, you're copying another perspective, whether that'south the camera or someone else'south eye.
Drawing past observation is always an act of revision and editing, correcting and refining. Nosotros make our own decisions based on how we perceive the subject and the page, which in plow creates an intimate view through the artist's eye. It'due south why we savor looking at the diverseness of work in museums: to better sympathise the earth those artists occupied, every bit they saw it, and to feel a kinship, an empathy, and to relate to the artist'southward point of view and their place inside history.
Our Final Word on Tracing
While we admit that tracing has its identify as a learning tool in specific contexts, we encourage you to challenge yourself to learn to draw without tracing. Beingness able to detect a subject from life, and make decisions about line, shape, scale, placement, proportion, perspective and curvature is difficult… but can also be gratifying. While tracing can be a tool in your toolbox, don't allow it to become the simply tool that you use.
Over to Yous
Do yous ever trace when making your work? Why or why non? Allow us know in the comments below.
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Source: https://vitruvianstudio.com/why-learn-to-draw-when-you-can-trace/
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