"Cheating"

I meant to post in this thread the other day. I know some people have already sort of gone over this, but here's my take on it: many artists start off tracing. I am no exception! It's actually not a bad way to start learning. The main problem with tracing to learn is that if you're tracing drawings (for instance, anime screencaps), you will often fall into bad habits regarding anatomy, etc. All that said, keep the following "rules of thumb" in mind:

Tracing an image implies that you have laid your drawing over top of another drawing/photo, and traced the lines to achieve your goal. I do not condemn this, HOWEVER, if you trace an image, it should be for your private learning only. I would suggest that you not post it anywhere, as it is essentially somebody elses work that you have mimicked.

Referencing is taking an existing picture as inspiration or guidance in a "free handed" (or, drawn without tracing) drawing. As most art teachers will tell you, drawing from life is a preferred method, but if you can't do that (and, let's be real, most of us don't have somebody waiting around to pose for us when we need it!), there are a lot of stock photo websites out there that are free and can help you if you're stuck. Here's a couple of excellent stock poses galleries that should help you get started: SenshiStock, Random Acts Stock.

- A couple of additional things to remember about referencing: there's degrees of referencing. If you copy a pose nearly exactly, it's polite to provide the source of your reference when you post your image somewhere. When in doubt, always cite your sources. This has the additional benefit of helping other artists find reference and stock sources they may not have known about before!
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We all have visions in our head, and they're almost always grander than our end results. Try not to let this discourage you in your journey. The best way to get better is to practice. We all have to start somewhere. We all get frustrated sometimes. I'm actually pretty frustrated with something I was working on, today! Sometimes our hands don't seem to quite connect with our brains, and things get snagged up along the way. Try not to let it get you down. As with most people learning to draw, I recommend that you try to doodle something every day. It doesn't have to be large or grand, just a little something to blow off some steam, and most importantly, practice.

I hope that this post has been helpful for you (and any others who may have been wondering the same things), if there's anything else I can do to help or encourage you, feel free to respond or send me a PM on the forum.

 

Eeeh, that's not really true, not only it gives bad habits as you said, but it blocks your imagination, expectations & goals, tricking you into thinking this is something you need to draw, and all-in-all it's a bad way to learn, as it takes much longer to understand how different things work, from bodies to composition, with tracing. You may not even ever fully understand what you're doing.

 

I suppose I sort of view tracing as a gateway that gets people interested in drawing. You are definitely right in that it is something that you can pick up very bad habits from, but I also don't completely condemn the practice as many will as long as the tracer is aware of what they're doing in tracing, and uses it appropriately. So perhaps "learning" was the wrong word. That's mostly what I was trying to say here. So, instead, I'll say that tracing is often something that gets people who would otherwise give up on drawing interested in learning the fundamentals that they may have otherwise passed up.

On that note, if you do trace, I recommend that you go back when you're doing, and attempt to reconstruct what you did. This is probably harder than it might be to build something up from scratch, but for many beginner artist, the end product is what is in their heads, rather than the steps they need to take to get there.

My method (and one included in many "how to draw" books and guides) is to construct a "skeleton" of what I'm drawing. This may be difficult to do for newcomers, so as I said, if you've traced something, it could be a good exercise to go back and attempt to find the basic shapes that the end product comprises of. Then you should try to draw it again, without the guidance of tracing.

Most of my sketches I've posted on this forum thus far have been cleaned up, so I went hunting through my photobucket to find an example of the sketch "skeleton" that will hopefully help you understand what I mean.

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Everything is a series of shapes and lines, and you can build up your drawing around those things. This is a good way to determine both movement and depth. When people ask me how to draw something, I most often tell them "start with a circle". It'll help you get where you want to go.

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@Aleiksei, obviously this whole post isn't in direct response, I've kind of rambled a bit. My aim here is to encourage people interested in art, so I hope that this is useful to somebody.