Tracing: Legitimate Artistic Practice or Outright Cheating?

[kerstin-orion.livejournal.com]

Members, I present to you the be-all and end-all discussion post on tracing, heavy referencing, and the benefits or evils thereof. This can be about the use of legitimate source material, such as photos you took and stock that specifies free and unlimited use, or it can be about using whatever one finds on a Google search.

Feel free to quote copyright laws, court decisions, link to (in)famous artists, and describe your own use (or non-use) of tracing. Share whether you'd commission someone who traces, and why or why not.

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The reasoning for this post is that almost every post about an artist tracing tends to devolve into a back-and-forth of "tracing is good", "no, it's cheating".

Therefore, we mods decided to have a general discussion about it, where everyone can share their viewpoints on the matter.

After this date, this specific topic will no longer be allowed in any post reporting an artist for tracing. We will freeze any threads that start discussing this and redirect them to this post. This is to help the posts stay on topic (whether the person is tracing), not whether tracing is good or bad.