Lately I've seen an obsession with "tracing", not only here but in other sites too and came to the conclusion that either they are taking it the wrong way or they are ignorant.
Talking in historical ways, tracing has been always a tool for artists. One of the instruments for this was the camera obscura whose inventor is unknown but it said Aristotle knew about it.
I guess photographers already know what that thing is but let's explain it:

_{Extracted from Wikipedia}
The principle of the camera obscura can be demonstrated with a rudimentary type, just a box (which may be room-size) with a hole in one side, (pretty similar to the pinholes cameras). Light from only one part of a scene will pass through the hole and strike a specific part of the back wall. The projection is made on paper on which an artist can then copy the image.

Leonardo da Vinci used it to do some of his illustrations. It's also said painters such as Johannes Vermeer also helped themselves with it.

Later, on the XIX century the camera lucida appeared on scene.

_{Extracted from Wikipedia}
The camera lucida performs an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing. The artist sees both scene and drawing surface simultaneously, as in a photographic double exposure. This allows the artist to duplicate key points of the scene on the drawing surface, thus aiding in the accurate rendering of perspective. At times, the artist can even trace the outlines of objects.

So, it's pretty obvious artist have always had help with their pictures. Nowadays it's the same, I've studied illustration and the very first exercise I did when I started was taking some advertisment photos and create an illustration tracing the elements I wanted from them.
Here you have it.


Would you say that picture doesn't worth a thing? Would you say it's not totally mine? My style?
When an illustrator is tracing what s/he's doing is taking references and then work over it to do what was in it's mind. And it's not a begginers issue, even proffesionals do it.

NOTE: I'm not defending people who uses it and copies directly, with no changes to fit an idea, just to get the spotlight or things like that and they can't even draw an O if they're not tracing it.
As I said, traicing is a tool that may save some precious time when you're working but, as every tool, you MUST KNOW HOW TO USE IT and you MUST KNOW TO DRAW or it will be pointless.


I'm not taking any side here, I'm just presenting real facts. You may like it or not, that's your choice, but that's how things are.
I though I should explain this since some people seems to ignore it.