This little sketch is a parody (in both the widely-used and technical sense of the word) of the SIIA’s “Don’t Copy That Floppy” video from the 1990s.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly averse to some forms of artistic “cheating”. But, a week or two ago, I was watching an old Youtube video by an absolutely excellent drawing teacher called Shoo Rayner and he started to talk about tracing.

He was quite emphatic that tracing isn’t cheating and he provided some fairly interesting arguments to back up his ideas (and he has another, more interesting video about tracing here). It’s worth watching these videos just to hear his views on the subject and to make up your own mind. Even so, I have to disagree very strongly about this whole subject.

I believe that tracing is one of the worst ways that an artist can cheat herself…