A Musing 6B: Trace Elements

You may recall, or more likely you may not, that in my last A Musing post I said I'd break down the various ways of transferring something from your mind onto a piece of paper (or screen, or piece of shale or whatever).  I said I would do it soon, and that was in April, which may cause you to wonder about my definition of "soon," but regardless, I'm doing it now, finally.

Assuming you didn't click on the link above and read the post (and you'll know if you did that I don't believe that you did for one second, so, sorry about that), you may need a refresher regarding what I think those methods were, so I'll list them below.  For now, all you really need to know is that we're covering the first one here.  It's tracing, just in case you skipped reading the post title as well as the linked post above.

So here's the list:

1. Tracing
2. Copying
3. Referencing
4. Knowing

I'm sure some of you are thinking "What about Abstracts?  What do they fall under?"  Well, I'm not sure that they always come from premeditation (which the list above is referring to).  Those that are planned would likely fall under knowing, and those that aren't would fall under Guessing, or Random, or Going by Gut or something.  That's not to put abstracts down - some of them look amazing, but it is to say that I don't do abstracts, so I can't know how they are arrived at. It's outside the coverage of the list anyway.  I mention it because someone brought it up after reading the last post.  Irrelevant to this one, but I had to cover it somewhere.  OK, done with that, let's talk Tracing.

Paintings by Bernie Fuchs, Canaletto, Drew Struzan, Thomas Eakins, John Constable, Johan Vermeer,  Norman Rockwell, and an illustration by Leonardo DaVinci - You can click the image for a better look.

You probably know most of these paintings, might even know their names, or who painted them.  Which do you think were traced, and which not?

Did you go through and guess?  Do I need to set up a Survey Monkey account to find out?  OK, good.  So the answer is all of them.  Well, sometimes.  Well, maybe.  Better to say all of the artists are suspected of, or have admitted to tracing, and it's highly likely that if they did at all they did some here (except DaVinci because any likely pieces from him have been lost).

You don't believe me.  Of course you don't believe me!  These are works by some of the most respected and well known artists alive or dead, surely you don't get to be respected if you trace!  But you do, and they are. Well, probably. 

Lets break it down a little.  

Fuchs, Rockwell, Struzan and Constable all admit to tracing, at least sometimes. (1)

Eakins, Canaletto and Vermeer are thought to have traced, but there is little hard evidence, and the claims as to how much they traced (if at all) are contested. (2)

There is no evidence that Da Vinci traced, but he did invent the technique used by Constable, and it is suspected he used it for some of his landscape studies even if not for work on his final paintings. He also suggested advantages to the use of the Camera Obscura by artists, but there is no real evidence that he used it himself. (3)

Other artists, such as Jan Van eyck and Lorenzo Lotto have also been suspected of tracing (the strongest proponents being artist David Hockney and physicist Charles M. Falco), but the strong consensus is now that they did not (or at least not by using the methods proposed by Hockney and Falco).

So where does that leave us?  All the artists here from the dawn of the photograph are fairly open about tracing, though Rockwell felt guilty for it.  He also says that he had to, because everyone was doing it and he needed to keep up, so that likely tells you something important. 

Commercial Art

In commercial art, tracing is not a rarity, but the only way to tell conclusively that someone traces is if they admit it, or are caught doing it, because some artists are just that good that they have no need to - and obviously there are also those whose style is so far removed from naturalism that tracing would be worthless - Quentin Blake clearly never traces anything..  

So it's not a rarity, but it's not like everyone's in on the big tracing arty-party either.

I know of many concept artists who create photo montages and then paint over the top, and I would consider that to be tracing too.   They don't necessarily declare it from the rooftops, but they don't deny either, and some leave their photomontage sticking out from the rest of the paint.  There is no shame in it, the ideas are as important as the finished result in their line of work - and none of it has anything to do with how it was arrived at.

And that, really, is the important thing - In a commercial setting it doesn't matter how the end result is arrived at, as long as no plagiarism is occurring, only that it is.

It should be noted that the majority of these artists can (or could) produce exceptional work without resorting to tracing, but tracing is a shortcut, and when you're up against the clock a shortcut will gain you a lot.

Let's look at it this way, when most people make spaghetti they buy the sauce from the store (at least here they do), and they buy any meat pre minced.  is that cheating? Or is the important thing that you got a delicious meal and it took you less than 40 minutes to make it?  Oh, a purist would say it is, but sod them, you've eaten and started watching Game of Thrones before they've managed to prep the tomatoes.

Now if someone asks for the recipe, hopefully you're going to be honest and tell them it's Ragu, because doing otherwise is being deceptive, and that's not going to get you any friends if they find out the truth behind your world class Spag Bol.

The end results are what matter - the process is really just of interest to other tradesmen, or should be.  Yes, there's talk, often, that tracing limits your artistic growth, is somehow deceitful (only when you deny doing it kids), results in identical looking work, makes you less of an artistic visionary, and so on.  Maybe true, maybe not - Probably true if that's all you do.

But look at the artwork on display above (and yeah, I'm breaking a personal rule on this one and posting other peoples art on my Blog - sometimes you need to).  Each of those works has a different and distinctive look - each is of the artist's own style, as unique to each other as snowflakes in a field.  Even if tracing I doubt I could produce a work as compelling as that by the worst of them, and most certainly not if I was painting traditionally rather than digitally.  Traced or not, these are works of visionaries, the end results of which capture the eye and the imagination in and of themselves.

Consider this, you see a Magician performing his routine.  You know he's not doing actual magic, he's using visual deception and slight of hand.  You marvel at the result - the signed card is contained within the artichoke, the assistant rests in two halves, legs kicking, eyes smiling, the freaking Statue of Liberty is missing!  You know it's a trick, you know, basically, how it's done, but you don't know the specifics and even if you did you probably couldn't do it yourself, because manipulating the cards, the hat, the blades and even the audience, takes skill, and it takes practice.

Art is like that - to do it well takes years to master, and if, once you're far enough along, you resort to shortcuts to get the piece done on time, what of it?

Fine Art

But that's professionals working to a commision.  What of fine artists doing it for the love of it, maybe making money as the end result, but maybe just a hobbiest? Well, at that point, again, who cares?  Maybe someone hates doing the layout stage, and tracing gets them to the point they enjoy, which is the actual painting or rendering.  Has any buyer of art looked at a piece they've fallen in love with and really given two figs if the underlying forms were traced or not?  Maybe a few, but likely not the majority.

Certainly not every artist traces. Probably most of those that do don't do it the vast majority of the time, but if they do you'd hope there would be admission if asked.  There's strong temptation not to anyway, given the amount of stigma associated with doing so.  And of course there are many artists whose works are more impressionistic, who don't need to trace at all because accuracy is not an expectation.  There is room for both, neither is necessarily "correct," they're all just making art.  To say that tracing reduces a piece of art is to say that photography does the same, and yet photography is considered an art form in and of itself.

My Stuff

So, you may have noticed that I fall on the side of the fence defending tracing.  Does that mean I do it then?  Does that make me a dirty tracer?

Yes, but not often.

The truth is that I like the process without tracing.  I like learning how to be more accurate in my representations without "cheating" (and I say cheating in that I feel as though I've let myself down, rather than any guilt over who sees what I've been doing).  But I have traced, I will trace again, and I have always stated when I have in the write up here on the blog.  The blog, as you know, is about honesty - I show you the shit as well as the shine, because denying it to you would be denying it to myself, and in doing so I would learn less from the process.

So yes I have.  Let's look at an example:

One thing in that image was traced.  Can you guess what it was without retreating into the original write up and reading for yourself?  No?  Good, because the process didn't really matter.  One of the three faces was traced, one used the grid method and one was done by hand (useful, given the other two can be used as examples in the next two related posts).  if you can't tell the difference then you know two things - The tracing doesn't drastically improve the end result, if just speeds things up a bit, and secondly, tracing doesn't have to be a rote copying of a photograph to still count as tracing.  Oh, you didn't know that second one?  I'll explain in a moment.

Before I do though, I'm serious that I don't trace often, but I have done so.  Not a single one of my speedpaints has been traced that I can recall (and if it was I'd have mentioned it in the write up), and only a handful of my other pieces were either.  This is important not because I'm ashamed of the times that I have (though I did feel guilty, as I've said) and want you to know that I repent my evil ways, but because I want you to understand that if you are the sort of person who frowns upon tracing I'll be clear and upfront about it here on the blog, so you know which pictures you should dislike.  I don't mention it when I post those images elsewhere - as I've said, if you don't care about the process you shouldn't care if it's traced or not, and if you do care then you'll come and read about it here.

Right, methods of tracing (all the following, unless stated, are derived from this stock photograph by AshleyShyD):

This is how your mom traces.  OK, not really, maybe your mom is Kelly Eddington, in which case she could trace the hell out of this - not that Kelly traces at all as far as I'm aware.

I have to tell you, this is really hard to do with a tablet. Doing it over the photograph with tracing paper would be easier, but this took the better part of an hour, and gave me a hand cramp.  When I transfer a sketch onto another piece of paper, as I did here, this is how I do it, but it is my least favourite part of the entire process. No fun at all, and at almost an hour I could have done a digital painting from the same source (and I likely will, at some point).  It wouldn't be as accurate, but it would likely be closer in spirit to the protograph, and more aesthetically pleasing.  The result is ugly, but possibly useful if you're going to spend the next 30 hours painting over it.

When I do trace (other than my own line art), what I do is more like this.

No, it's not pretty, it doesn't need to be.  I suppose you could do some weird things with it and pass it off as a post modern deconstruction or something.  So what's it like that for?   Mostly because it's only covering the bigger, more difficult angles and the overall proportions.  As I've said, I quite like the process, more than this wouldn't be as much fun.  I'm not sure I've ever shown a picture at this stage before (the one for the Doctor, above, I didn't show until I'd added details and sorted out the hair, and I think I may have put in more detail on the initial trace than this too - he's got a hard face to get right), and I usually don't, because unless you're me this isn't going to mean all that much.  The extended lines are to show me things that match up with other things by the way - so here I can see that the basic lines of the eyes and hair across the face line up, as does the peak of the nose at the brows and her pupil on one side, and almost the corner of her hair and her pupil from the other side. This helps with reading things from the original image - you can think of it as an image specific grid if you like (but grids are for next time) - these are much the same relationships I try to spot when speedpainting, but it's much less accurate when doing it by eye.  Compared to your mom's tracing, this one took about three minutes.

For a bit of fun I went back and traced the photograph again a few times more.

I was trying different techniques and different levels of detail here.  The idea in each was not to make the image itself pretty, but to glean different levels of importance from each - to show how different artists could approach the same tasks in different ways due to different priorities and mindsets. Obviously they're all still by me - but now I'm thinking I should do an experiment to actually get other artists to draw over the same photo and see what comes back, that could be quite interesting (but I won't delay this post any further for such an experiment). None of these took more than 10 minutes, and probably a lot less.

And finally this was an attempt to make the tracing in and of itself a fairly pretty piece of art.  I quite like it, but your milage may vary.

Conclusion

So is tracing cheating then?  Well, emotionally I still have a dose of the guilties whenever I do it, because I've always been told it was wrong, and I feel I've let myself down when I do. Actually thinking about it though, I'm much less sure, and feel it's probably just fine, provided the following:

• The artist is capable of a similar level of illustrative competence without relying on tracing, and is using it as one part of a larger process.
• Or the artist is using tracing as a method for working through, or learning things.
• The artist is honest about it's use if asked about technique (I don't think they need to mention it otherwise).

So on that first point, if you go back to the picture of the Doctors and feel that the one I've traced is better than the two I didn't then I really shouldn't have traced it, but personally I feel they're all of a piece, with none clearly better than the rest (one is clearly worse perhaps, but that's a discussion for another post - the one in which I covered the picture in fact).

I've also heard many cries of 'Plagiarism!' regarding artists who trace, but that could apply just as much to artists who copy anything that doesn't strictly belong to them. Whether they trace or not it seems pretty irrelevant to the argument to me.  So I think this is irrelevant to the whole tracing argument too; as long as the Artist is honest about sources it seems artistically fair to me (whether it's legal is another matter entirely, but I'm not a lawyer, so I have no comment there).

And really, that's all I've got to say about tracing.  On the Next A Musing I'll go into Grids, which are much less contentious for some reason, cover a lot of similar ground, and should make for a much easier post to write (because I don't mind telling you that this one took a lot more effort than most).  That one shouldn't be as long coming, as I want to get through these fairly swiftly so I  can talk about light, and how much of what you thought about it was wrong... possibly.

THE END

(1) Yes, I did just link to an Article in the Christian Science Monitor, it's not a site I frequent, but the article was relevant - turns out its nothing like it's title might suggest, so I learned something new there.

(2) It is fairly well accepted that if Vermeer traced at least the layouts for his paintings he likely did so using a simple Camera Obscura. However, an alternative (and more controversial) possibility was proposed by inventor Tim Jenison, and became the subject of the documentary Tim's Vermeer by Penn and Teller.  You can read more about it here.
(3) I read about his invention of the Glass on Easels technique years ago, but I'll be darned if I can find a reputable online reference to it now. He was Da Vinci though, so would you be surprised if he invented such a thing?  It often seems like he invented everything else.  Also, this article is off topic, but I found it interesting.