Happy LATE pride!! IT'S JULY NOW.
I'm up late, so I wanted to write about whatever until I get tired.
I've been thinking about this for a little bit, but it's so weird how stuff like art is disscussed online with other people. There's a concerning amount of people who will share everything whether it be personal or not out in the open on the internet (which includes art yes) and a slight subset of people who think that they are somehow more important or worth anybody else's time just because they can draw things sometimes, or whatever is going on with tracing, or
I'll go backwards since the tracing thing still gets under my skin. I don't know when tracing became an indicator of "bad art," but I'm going to assume it was in the early to mid 2010s. A lot of people who think about 'tracing' are probably thinking about someone copying someone else's oc by drawing over every line and barely changing anything. If you went on a site like toyhouse for example, you would see a warning page with "do not trace my characters."
Now I'm not saying that taking people's art and claiming it as their own work by tracing it isn't at all an issue or hasn't happened, but usually the people who do this are trolls, 12 years old, or both. I seriously can't think of a case in recent memory of somebody tracing who wasn't just doing that "just cuz" or they're some kid.
Also professionals trace sometimes, there's a handful of methods you could choose for tracing, and tracing can be transformative. Anything that seems "bad" in art could be intentional or transformative. What defines visual art as 'good' shouldn't just be "fan art that looks realistic;" making everything look polished is boring.