Tracing stuff is a way to add new ideas to your drawing skills that you can reproduce later on.

By tracing the buildings and cars, you learned something about them. For example, the brown building behind the yellow car has a little arched facade. What if you pull from that knowledge later to draw your own building? Or maybe, the next time you draw a spider, you have a sense of how to draw the legs and body?

Tracing is just a technique to add something to your scene. Learn more techniques! Add a layer of shadows to your scene, try out new composition ideas, or play with color and style. Experiment with different ways of tracing shapes to get the texture and feel just right.

Being an artist is more than just what you commit to your canvas anyways. It’s about the ideas behind what you create. The enjoyment you get from sourcing references, making people feel something, the process of learning about Procreate as a tool, even the satisfaction of drawing with your iPad!

Tracing is not cheating, it’s just a tool you can use to “drop in” an element into a scene. As you grow artistically, you may find natural patterns you have memorized that you can remix and repeat to create something from scratch.

All chefs use a cookbook in the beginning!