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Cathy McFarland

Is tracing cheating?

I will be really honest and say that I have struggled getting my art mojo working for me. I was first derailed by a spate of good weather. Not what you would typically expect to throw someone off, but someone who loves the outdoors and water sports, a dry low wind day is not to be wasted. as the week was so good I spent a lot of time on the water. I've mentioned before that my energy levels vary. Typically then if I expect a lot of energy doing things outside, I feel too tired to sit down to art. I'll discuss this more in another post.

As has become the norm for me I looked around for something I could do that would keep me moving, at least a little. Scrolling through Instagram I found an account which had an interesting way of splitting the body up into sections to help reproduce anatomically correct figures. I little like the anatomy book I have been working on (must get back to that too), but a little more true to form.

Feeling tired and despondent, I shied away from sketching directly. I then thought about tracing figures and then working out a way to split up the body. My idea was to find a consistent way to break the body down into sections, including muscle groups where appropriate, that I could then apply to any figure I wanted to draw.

I jumped on Amazon and bought some good quality tracing paper. I've only done one session of this (though I did do around ten different studies), and found it quite useful. It made me think about which muscles you can easily see and which you cant. Where to separate limps and how to show joints. I do think this is something I should keep working at. It also made me think about how the skull is formed and how best to show that too. Yet another good idea that I'm not sticking with.

Perhaps I need to go back to my schedule? Or simply make myself do one exercise in each thing I'm trying, per day. Then move on to some "project" work. That's a thought actually......



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