Rey Tracing On/Off (Patreon)

So I had this idea a few months back and well it seems as though the results weren’t quite as conclusive as I‘d expected. Tracing as a practise in art is largely frowned upon, I personally think it can be used as a tool to aide in learning to draw, confidence in pen use (as someone with coordination issues, developing those skills are essential) in terms of shape and form.

I was shocked when I learned several big artists I admired were tracers themselves, in professional or fan art, especially after I’d gone through hours of studying and drawing faces over and over to figure out how everything goes together, to try and reach their level. And to learn they just traced, well, is both demoralising but also encouraging if you can push yourself to obtain a level they could too, without those aides.

The important thing to realise too is that most of those artists don’t trace exclusively, often it’s down to time constraints or other demands, like achieving a true to life representation, and their painting and colouring style are more the focus than the resemblance is. People have said I trace, I do sometimes I‘ll admit, in regards to monthly requests where I need to do 5 sketches of real characters, unless they’re stylised. And those animations do involve a degree of rotoscoping.

But the big artworks, the comics, those aren’t traced. And the idea was this piece was to show that off. I drew Rey’s face in this picture from a photo, first as reference, that’s the RTX OFF picture. Then I slapped the photo into the canvas and traced it, that’s the RTX ON. All that’s different between them is the line work on the face, and some additional freckles here and there. The difference is there, maybe not super noticeable in the compressed gif, but yeah the natural one is more loose, more me.

The RTX and title is a reference to a rendering technique where light more realistically simulates real life, it’s becoming more present in video games thanks to fancy graphics cards like the RTX 3090. Hopefully the lighting in this piece, complete with subsurface scattering in the ears, makes the title appropriate.