Ever since I started drawing, I've been told time and time again, "Tracing is cheating." Likely you've been told this before, too, and, like me, now hold this belief as a principle of the gospel of art.
I've gone to great lengths to not trace. I've looked down my nose at Tracers. I've expounded on how photography has limits and how tracing warped imagery is like shooting yourself in your tiny distorted foot. I've erased and redrawn things over and over if it happened to be a bit too small or in the wrong place. In short, I've clung to the precarious ledge of principle on the steep slope of inevitability.
Inevitable, I say? Yes, at some point everyone, even the great and stubborn Samantha, has to bow to efficiency. One reaches a time when one must ask oneself: "Is this belief helping, or hurting?" And Samantha has finally reached her breaking point.
Now before you throw me to the dogs, hear me out. One of the caveats of my style is that it takes a lot of time to put all them curlycues and details into everything. I spend hours and weeks and months fastidiously drawing a pattern, only to have to draw it again transferring it to my painting surface. And I haven't even painted it yet! After years of doing this, I've finally reflected; This is Madness!
What was the turning point for me? I’ve been working on a new painting that has a zillion and a half flowers in it, and after spending two hours painstakingly drawing all the petals on all of nine flowers, I did a bit of mental math. I want to finish this painting this year, if I can. This is not the way to accomplish that. I came up with a solution to expedite this process.
Here's a little video I made explaining my solution:
So there you have it; Samantha is now a traitor to the cause of the purists. Oh, how the mighty have fallen! (But, hopefully,) oh, how the output will increase!
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