Ask Ali: Is it okay to Trace?
YES!
The End.
I’m being purposefully flippant, do bear with me, I’m doing it for dramatic effect to allow people to understand that when it comes to art, there is no right, wrong, higher, lower, trendy, archaic, positive or negative way to be creative.
When I was at university, one of my tutors gave me this piece of advice:
’Make art, then make some more art’
what he meant was to stop hypothesising about it and make it happen as it matters not how you get there or what the result is, there is no end, and the path that you are on is the one that you are on and to quit over-analysing it.
How does this relate to tracing?
Tracing is a tool in the same way that an electric whisk beats eggs. Do we tell people that they should whisk their eggs by hand for their meringues? Of course not because we have a better tool to get us to the same point.
So here comes the second question:
Is tracing cheating?
I can’t seem to find a font big enough to write this:
NO!
It’s a short-cut, a way of getting to a point faster, a mechanism for cutting out a very small part of the process. It IS cheating to say that you drew something freehand if you didn’t and you can’t expect your drawing to improve if you trace all of the time but that doesn’t make it cheating, that’s nonsense.
I’ll talk briefly about how damaging this is at the end but before that, there are several studies claiming that Renaissance painters used a Camera Obscura for their work and if you would like to read more, start with the Wikipedia page HERE. Some argue that there is no evidence for painters using the device but David Hockney astutely points out in his book ‘Secret Knowledge’:
Even today, he says, the artists wouldn’t tell: “They’re very secretive. Remember, they’re competing in business as well.”
It was also the time of the Inquisition, when mirrors and lenses were associated with witchcraft.
“When Caravaggio is painting in Rome, around the corner in the square, they’re burning Claudio Bruni for looking through lenses,” says Hockney.
Camera obscura in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 18th century
What should be more concerning about the whole ‘Is it cheating’ debate is that who is anyone to tell you how to be creative? I can’t tell you how to create something, I can only tell you how I create something, it incenses me that someone would feel they have perceived authority to dictate creativity to another. There’s a social media/popular culture phrase that says ‘You do you’ and while it has been overused, I agree with it wholeheartedly, but if you have got to the end of this blog post and still disagree with me, let me leave you with the words of Mary Shelley from her novel Frankenstein:
"Do you," said I, "enjoy yourself, and let this be our rendezvous. I may be absent a month or two; but do not interfere with my motions, I entreat you: leave me to peace and solitude for a short time; and when I return, I hope it will be with a lighter heart, more congenial to your own temper."
May you be tracing something as you read this, Ali