How to get the most out of practicing by tracing other artists?

[aqua03]

So this is something I've been told a lot that has helped me once or twice: Practice art by tracing artists you like (But NEVER posting it.) to get a feel of their art style.

I've mostly only done successful "Copy art powers by tracing" with general poses by tracing over the figure in basic shapes to get a feel of the form I want, but every time I try to do it for say like... practicing anatomy by tracing out of one of my Loomis books or my manga for example, it never quite seems to fully stick.

Should I trace it, then try to replicate it from memory like I do with general poses?

If you do do similar exercises, how do you go about it?

(Also any tips on patience and work ethic when it comes to practicing art and developing good art habits would really help in general, too. I get FOMO and Distracted way too easily it seems....)

[river121693]

I can't really think of how you'd learn by tracing the outline of someone else art, outside of maybe muscle memory of how to stylize things or how they connect different body parts. But you're ultimately not learning how the artist create the basic form.

I find it more useful to trace real photographs as a way to break down 3d form, while using artists as reference on how they simplify or stylize the figure.

This is what I do. it's easier to understand than Loomis, personally.

This is how I trace:

[thepenmonster]

There are three types of tracing.

1. Swiping from better artists and passing it off as your own. Don't do this.

2. Copying and breaking down the forms to see how others have found a solution to art problems. Do this with a lot of different styles. With enough study and practice you will build a library in your head to work from.

3. Tracing your own reference photos and using those elements to create something new. This is common practice and if it was good enough for Norman Rockwell it's good enough for you.

[BoomerZ]

I wouldn't trace no matter what. It's not how you learn. To learn anatomy you should be learning the form from underlying structure, not copying other artist mistakes. And that is what an artist's style is. It's his mistakes and shortcuts to problems he learn from. By copying them, you are copying the mistakes but not the reason he is doing them. You should really be free handing art, even if you are copying for reference. Learn the distances between structures by measuring with your eye.

Another problem with tracing anatomy, it doesn't help with comic art. Comic art is usually poses that are pushed, which means exaggerated. Learn anatomy by free handing real pictures of people (preferably nude) such as life drawing. Once you have enough life drawing practice, you can then use those to create pictures freehand from experience drawing other poses like it.

[darthmongoose]

The problem I have with tracing for learning is it's really easy to disengage your brain and just go over all the lines on autopilot.

The thing is, just seeing that the lines are there can only go so far in learning things like anatomy and perspective. You have to build an understanding of why the lines are there. Really go meta, really start to think of lines as an abstract representation of a boundary of three-dimensional space or matter. That's why just using a trace for basic shapes, or blocking out the volumes tends to be more successful; because you're thinking when you do it.

It's like how just listening to a lecture is okay... but writing notes so you engage with key points is better, and then recapping what you learned in the lecture in your own words is even better.

Comic and animation art is hard because it's not all just about doing whatever you need to do to make the best illo possible. You also need to be consistent and make it feel like all the stuff in your comic/animation is happening to the same people in the same world... and then also you'll need to draw objects, poses, expressions, that'd just... probably not come up in illustration all that much. So the core skill of a comic artist or traditional animator is to be able to draw...basically anything that could exist in a consistent style with everything else. Those core skills of a truly deep understanding of anatomy and perspective, not in the "I can name all the muscles in the body, look at how well I draw a muscular naked man standing still" or "I can draw a very detailed building in 3-point perspective completely from scratch!" sense, but in the "I can draw two animal people crying and hugging in this very simple, cartoony style that looks nothing like reality both look totally believable in how their bodies are interacting, and provoke an emotional response because of it."

It can make it hard to feel like you're improving at comic art... because weirdly it sometimes feels like only people who aren't really artistically inclined, or people who are really good at comic art can really appreciate truly good comic art... while people who are kinda...mediocre at art will be all Dunning Kreuger effect, "psh, it's not that good a drawing. Look at how much more detailed and fancy my art is!" ...But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and you'll know you're getting better because the audience will feel more drawn to it, and will connect to it more. In Scott McCloud's books, he calls this "Surface"; some artists are all surface, and lack that fundamental depth of understanding that makes comic art truly great, because they care more about how cool or beautiful their art looks, or how much it shows off their technical skills... not how well it connects the audience with the characters and story.

Really... for me, the best way to improve and to stay motivated has always been "just draw a comic". Draw comics that force you to draw character types and scenarios where you simply cannot tell that story without drawing things that are hard, like tricky environments, actions, expressions etc. Just do your best, and whenever you hit a pose or object where you think "Errr.... what should this be like", break out some real life reference and try to put that in your style. Focus purely on clarity of storytelling and emotional impact, ie. on what your audience's experience of your work is.

[Lensing]

Here is how I do it:
I trace, draw a 3d structure over the image, draw the structure free hand, draw it from memory.
It´s perfect to get a better feeling for proportions.
To learn muscles attachements.
To learn the 3d structures of i.e. portraits drawing
And to learn styles.

[Legendofgenii]

I was about to suggest asking @Lensing but they beat me to it.

@aqua03 I'm happy to start some kind of online art course or challenge with you, if you like? It sometimes helps to work as a small group (or class), so you can encourage one another etc.

[DokiDokiTsuna]

Everyone's already said all the most important things, so I'll just say this: I think it helps to have to re-render things in your own art style. Incidentally, I did this tracing exercise just last week, and the most surprising part was finding out that the manga artist's spindly-limbed body structures didn't work for my character designs. ^^;

I honestly couldn't tell before trying to trace them that the heads were so small, and the arms and legs were so long, proportionally...Narae Lee made it look great, but for some reason I couldn't. ^^; So in the end, although I "traced" the general outlines and poses of the figures, I still had to do the hard work of redoing their proportions myself, on top of redrawing them as my own characters:

And I think I learned a lot from the experience. ^^ Just being challenged to draw poses and gestures that were outside of my basic repertoire was super valuable, I think.

P.S. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I think it's fine to post traced/heavily-referenced work, as long as you credit the artist it came from and/or say explicitly that it's a trace. I think the biggest issue is that it'd be super boring for your followers to look at you just copy someone else's work, unless you do something creative with it like ^so.

[moontokkym]

If you want to practice by trying tracing I'd really recommend Ethan Becker's videos. He plays quite à braggy character with a lot of bravado and does "fake call out videos" about his fellow artists that's basically an excuse to analyse what really pops in their style and makes things work and what they're really good at (basically agressive complimenting).

In his videos he often does a tracing exercise where he'll show you how to practice with it (because he'll often take parts of other people's style and show how you can use it while taking it in a whole different direction) he'll trace over an original art piece very simply and then, next to the traced piece he'll freehand a copy of the original to practice. The tracing is used as a "practice for the practice" and a way of looking at leading lines and proportions more clearly.

[aqua03]

So basically what I'm getting here is that I should focus more on how artists draw out general shapes and volumes and the like if I do tracing studies and then breakdown how they do line and detail work by observation as well if that makes sense?

@Legendofgenii That sounds fun. Thanks.

[Lensing]

You can use tracing for different things. Most drawing courses that I did had parts where
you trace. I did the Proko anatomy course for example, you learn how to trace muscles
to understand the form and to remember where they connect. That helped me a lot.

I did the doodle warrior course, that´s a very good portrait drawing course. You learn
the 3dimensional structure of the face, the facial features, hair etc.
The first step of drawing the portrait is always tracing. You trace a "lay in" over the
face and then you copy the lay in by eyeballing it. It trains you muscle memory / eye
a lot and after a while you will see that lay in when you look at someone´s face because
you imagine the line from the eyebrow area to the top of the ear for example.
I´ll attach a picture of it.

Then you can use tracing to learn styles. It´s important that you don´t leave it at
the tracing but also try to draw what you traced by looking at the reference, then
checking if you did right and then draw it from from memory.