Art Before and After Draw This Again
Tin can tracing assist you develop your drawing skills?
Learning to describe well is difficult. Information technology can take years of practice and proficient instruction and even so, there are no guarantees. We make sure our students understand this before they begin learning with us, and most are eager to accept the challenge. Just once in a while, someone will betoken out an obvious alternative. It normally goes something like this:
"Omg, why don't you just trace a photograph instead? That's what I practise, and information technology'due south style easier! Lol!"
It's piece of cake to dismiss this kind of response every bit naive or simply somebody trolling. But if you're interested in drawing by observation without tracing, information technology'due south a question y'all should be able to reply. If drawing is and 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 as far back as the 1400s, have incorporated tracing into their drawing process. These artists used lens devices to assist them better understand and capture what they saw, yielding some of the world's great masterpieces. Today, the practice of tracing photographs has proliferated throughout the representational art world as a quick and convenient alternative to the challenges of drawing well.
So, if lots of artists are doing it, and accept been for centuries, tin can tracing really be that bad?
If you're familiar with what we do here at Vitruvian Studio, y'all already know that nosotros prefer to draw by direct observation informed past measurement, without the help of tracing or grids. There are, however, some legitimate uses of tracing when learning to draw, if only in a few specific contexts. In this post, we'll tackle the tracing result head-on, and look at the pros and cons of tracing as a learning tool. Can tracing be used to teach yous the fundamentals of drawing or will information technology prevent you from reaching your full potential? You be the judge.
What Can You Learn Nearly Drawing By Tracing?
Benefit #one: Tracing Tin can Aid Yous Get Accustomed to Drawing Processes and Materials
If you're simply starting to learn, the human activity of drawing can seem overwhelming. Something as unproblematic as belongings a pencil and moving it appropriately on the page can be difficult and frustrating. Tracing an image can assistance you focus on the physical demands of drawing without worrying about whether you're getting it right. It can aid you develop manus-centre coordination and muscle memory that are important for controlling the materials of drawing. It's similar a kind of rehearsal for your future cartoon development.
This kind of practise is too useful for learning to make decisions in the showtime stage of drawing. We typically brainstorm by "blocking-in" the major masses of the subject area with simplified, directly-sided shapes. Students sometimes struggle with this concept. Typically, we endeavor to include likewise much detail early on. Tracing references is a convenient, inexpensive way to practice blocking-in. By tracing along the longest, broadest sweeps of the contour, you can learn what to ignore when establishing the biggest shapes.
It's important, still, to use the pencil in the same way that you will when y'all're not tracing. When cartoon "freehand", we tend to first with light, soft and temporary lines while we get our bearings. Tracings, however, tend to yield a sharper, harder and continuous line that results in a apartment and cartoonish look. If yous trace to get used to the human activity of cartoon, attempt to do it equally if you lot're not tracing.
Benefit #2: Tracing Can Help You Empathize Beefcake and Structure
An instructor at the New York Academy of Fine art would sometime prescribe a tracing practice. For those of us struggling to draw the effigy, he would photocopy a master drawing and tell u.s. to trace it. He told united states to pay particular attention to the curvature of the profile. Notice where it is more than rounded, where it is flatter, and where it overlaps other contours. Consider the anatomy of the figure while you do this and attempt to understand why the contour changes the way it does. Even draw the bones and muscles and effort to relate them to what's happening on the surface. Then, one time the tracing is consummate, describe the figure again – but freehand this time, and at a larger scale.
This exercise packs a 1-2 punch. Tracing an example helps you learn about how a chief creative person represented the human effigy. It focuses your attention in a mode that but looking doesn't quite achieve. It'due south the visual equivalent of reading aloud while studying for a exam. Reproducing that cartoon at a larger scale provides an opportunity to exercise, and as well demands more input from you. Since a larger drawing will crave more than description than you can see clearly in the smaller reference, you'll need to improvise a little.
This kind of tracing exercise provides a fashion of closely studying some other artist's piece of work, and squaring it with your own knowledge and ability. It'due south an effective way to discover what y'all need to work on when learning to draw the figure from ascertainment, or even from imagination.
Do good #3: Tracing Can Help You Understand Foreshortening
"Foreshortening" is the word nosotros utilize to depict how an object looks when viewed on end. For example, if you lot were cartoon a figure with an arm stretched out toward yous, it would appear "foreshortened". We typically struggle with foreshortening because the outer shape of the object nosotros're drawing is not what nosotros expect. We think of limbs as being long and skinny and tend to draw them that way, even when they announced quite unlike in a foreshortened view.
Tracing can exist an constructive way to study the effects of foreshortening. Endeavor drawing an "envelope", or a rudimentary block-in, on top of existing images of figures in diverse foreshortened views. Doing then tin can starkly illustrate the difference between our expectations (limbs are long and skinny) and what nosotros're really seeing. This kind of tracing tin help free yous from your preconceived, and incorrect, assumptions about what figures expect like.
Benefit #four: Tracing Tin can Help You Understand Linear Perspective
Linear Perspective is a challenging subject area for students learning to describe. It often involves measurement and calculation and tin can seem a footling too much similar math. Just having at least a bones understanding of how perspective works is of import for conveying 3-dimensional infinite in drawings.
Tracing images can be an effective 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. Any two or more parallel elements in a picture that recede dorsum and away from the viewer volition share a common vanishing point. Students are often skeptical of this principle when drawing from life. Our brains simply aren't wired to find things like this. Only tracing on meridian of a photograph to see where receding parallels intersect can provide convincing show that vanishing points are existent and should exist taken seriously when drawing. [bctt tweet="Can tracing teach y'all the fundamentals of drawing or will it prevent you from reaching your total potential?" username="vitruvianstudio"]
The Pitfalls of Tracing
All of these instances show how tracing can provide an effective way to learn 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 Clarify Your Work
Drawing well is ultimately about making practiced decisions. It's most observing your field of study carefully, understanding why information technology looks the manner it does and recreating that appearance on the folio with an effective method. A successful drawing is the production of analysis.
But tracing is often done mindlessly, with no analysis at all. Tracing doesn't require you to study your subject or examine your choices. If you lot're just copying lines, you don't take to ask questions or solve problems. When you trace, do you consider the light source? Do you lot think about where the shadows are? Practice you think about the underlying structure of your subject? Are you lot thinking about perspective? Exercise you plan your composition? Do you consider alternatives to how the image you're tracing presents the subject? The respond to these questions is ordinarily "no". In other words, when you trace you probably don't truly understand what you're drawing, or why you're drawing information technology that way. In our opinion, this diminishes the overall drawing experience.
Pitfall #2: Tracing Can Result in Flat Drawings
Newspaper is apartment. Simply when cartoon observationally, nosotros commonly seek to create the illusion of volume and infinite on the page. In other words, nosotros want our drawings to appear three-dimensional. Achieving this kind of illusion requires you to think in a item mode virtually what and how you're cartoon, because carefully the various 3-dimensional characteristics of your subject.
When most people trace, however, it commonly results in a very flat, cartoonish drawing. The tendency is to trace contours with a continuous, unbroken outline that appears to sit down uniformly on the same aeroplane – like a chalk outline at a law-breaking scene. Even if the shapes are basically right, it can be needlessly hard to make such a apartment-looking drawing appear iii-dimensional and lifelike in the end.
Pitfall #3: Tracing Tin Become a Crutch
Tracing is one thing, but drawing freehand is something else entirely. Beingness good at i doesn't automatically mean that you'll exist adept at the other. If you're non careful, you may find yourself clinging to tracing because you're afraid to try cartoon without it – or possibly you exercise try, and the results are disappointing, and y'all become back to what feels better.
But there'south no demand to be afraid of drawing from ascertainment. While learning to draw freehand is challenging, and volition definitely push you out of your comfort zone, it will besides empower y'all. Just like whatsoever skill, there are many small-scale steps to take along the mode, each of which provides its own reward.
Pitfall #4: Tracing Doesn't Guarantee Proficient Results Anyway
We live in a photographic historic period. Every twenty-four hour period, we are bombarded with hundreds of images that are derived from some type of lens device, and we tend to accept them as truthful. This is a state of listen known as being "photographic camera conditioned".
But photographs aren't truthful. Instead, they distort reality in countless subtle ways. Lens effects, exposure settings, compression artifacts, software biases and more can have a dramatic impact on how any photograph appears to us. However we withal often signal to photographs as the ultimate manifestation of accuracy in imagery. "Wow! That cartoon looks simply similar a photograph!"
Tracing a photograph may seem similar the quickest route to accuracy in drawing, only if that's how you approach it, the distortions you fail to notice in your photo reference will carry over into your artwork. That, combined with the tendency mentioned above to trace simplistically, in a 2-dimensional mode, can yield some pretty weird looking results. This can be quite discouraging, particularly considering that tracing is supposed to be easy.
Cheque out our Drawing Basics course to learn your fundamental drawing skill set.
Pitfall #five: Tracing Doesn't Convey Your Unique Point of View
The concluding statement against tracing concerns who is really in control of your artwork. Part of what makes drawing past observation difficult is the sheer number of decisions you have to make while developing a drawing from get-go to finish. The relative success of your work depends to a big extent on how y'all choose to solve issues as they arise.
But this is also what makes drawing interesting and incessantly variable. Put ten master artists in a studio together, all drawing the same thing, and you lot'll see ten different results. Each cartoon will capture the subject faithfully, and all the same each one will be unique because it is the product of an individual listen. Each artist will cull his or her own way to tackle any given problem, yielding different results. This is how individuality tin shine through in artwork, fifty-fifty in the context of strict realism.
When you trace your work there is a huge number of decisions that you lot don't get to make. Things like scale, placement, proportion, construction, and perspective in your cartoon are all determined past whatsoever image you're tracing. With then many decisions made for y'all, you don't become to discover out what your drawing would look like if y'all were to work those things out for yourself. In this mode, tracing is restrictive. Instead of sharing what y'all see in your own unique way, y'all're copying another perspective, whether that's the camera or someone else's eye.
Drawing by ascertainment is e'er an human action of revision and editing, correcting and refining. We make our ain decisions based on how we perceive the field of study and the page, which in turn creates an intimate view through the creative person'south center. It'southward why nosotros bask looking at the diverseness of work in museums: to amend sympathize the world those artists occupied, every bit they saw it, and to feel a kinship, an empathy, and to relate to the artist's betoken of view and their place within history.
Our Last Discussion on Tracing
While we acknowledge that tracing has its place as a learning tool in specific contexts, we encourage you lot to challenge yourself to larn to describe without tracing. Being able to observe a bailiwick from life, and make decisions about line, shape, scale, placement, proportion, perspective and curvature is difficult… but can also exist gratifying. While tracing tin be a tool in your toolbox, don't let it to become the only tool that you utilise.
Over to You
Do y'all ever trace when making your work? Why or why not? Let u.s. 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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