A place to talk about art, artists, and art education
To Trace or Not to Trace....
Okay, so I'm in the SITE program this year and I'm thinking there may be some issues. For anyone who may be reading this who doesn't know what the SITE program is, it's a program at the NAU College of Education through which you take all of your education courses at the same time and do your practicum with Sedona Red Rock high school. The advantages of this program are that you have a more cohesive, connected program and more experience. So far I'm having a great time taking all my classes at once, it's the practicum part that's frightening me.
So what could be frightening? No, it's not the students. The students were wonderful. It's the teacher, it's the way the class is set up, it's the lack of meaning, it's the darn tracing.
Now don't get me wrong, I know tracing is useful, but ONLY when you want to make copies of something. I use tracing paper when I want to make duplicates of the same image (most of the time my own artwork or drawings) to work through color combinations without destroying the original or for making duplicate copies of a template so I can cut one of them up. Tracing is not how you teach someone to draw, unless they're 6 years old or younger and even then I probably wouldn't use tracing, there are other ways to teach little kids how to draw and still maintain their confidence.
It's not like it's tracing for one project either. When the students need to draw, it's perfectly fine for them to trace the image instead of draw it on their own in the eyes of this teacher. One of the "advanced" students was doing a portrait and it was painfully obvious to me that to get the lines of her image, she traced them, filling in the value on her own. It looked horrible but only because there was beautiful value work inside this bubbly shell of the traced contour lines of the head.
To top it all off, I seem to be the only one in the art room who thinks this is horrible. Now I can't blame the ceramicist, jewelery, and theater majors that are with me for thinking it's okay, they're 3D people. Fortunately for me I can do 3D and 2D both very well, which I've found, through my 6 years at college, is rare. Normally 3D people can't do 2D and vice versa. In fact, I've found that the 3D brained people often despise drawing much more than 2D people despise 3D. I'm not stating this as unequivocal fact, but it's definitely a trend I've noticed. So, while I'm sitting there cringing at the site of the tracing paper again, at the horrible "drawings" that have no life or personality, the others are perfectly fine with it. As a charcoal loving, graphite-stained-hands devotee, I feel that not only is the ART of drawing being downplayed as some meaningless, trivial task, but it's also insulting the students intelligence.
The reason, I'm told, for the tracing is to maintain the student's confidence. To me, it sounds like people just don't want to try and TEACH the students how to draw. What about the students who decide to go to a University and get a fine arts degree? You may not like to draw, but there's no way those drawing teachers in those drawing classes that you HAVE to take are going to let you trace. How are you going to trace an image in your brain onto a canvas for the beginnings of a painting?
I'm curious of what other people think, so if you're reading this and you have an opinion, let me know. Do you think it's okay to use tracing in this way?
So what could be frightening? No, it's not the students. The students were wonderful. It's the teacher, it's the way the class is set up, it's the lack of meaning, it's the darn tracing.
Now don't get me wrong, I know tracing is useful, but ONLY when you want to make copies of something. I use tracing paper when I want to make duplicates of the same image (most of the time my own artwork or drawings) to work through color combinations without destroying the original or for making duplicate copies of a template so I can cut one of them up. Tracing is not how you teach someone to draw, unless they're 6 years old or younger and even then I probably wouldn't use tracing, there are other ways to teach little kids how to draw and still maintain their confidence.
It's not like it's tracing for one project either. When the students need to draw, it's perfectly fine for them to trace the image instead of draw it on their own in the eyes of this teacher. One of the "advanced" students was doing a portrait and it was painfully obvious to me that to get the lines of her image, she traced them, filling in the value on her own. It looked horrible but only because there was beautiful value work inside this bubbly shell of the traced contour lines of the head.
To top it all off, I seem to be the only one in the art room who thinks this is horrible. Now I can't blame the ceramicist, jewelery, and theater majors that are with me for thinking it's okay, they're 3D people. Fortunately for me I can do 3D and 2D both very well, which I've found, through my 6 years at college, is rare. Normally 3D people can't do 2D and vice versa. In fact, I've found that the 3D brained people often despise drawing much more than 2D people despise 3D. I'm not stating this as unequivocal fact, but it's definitely a trend I've noticed. So, while I'm sitting there cringing at the site of the tracing paper again, at the horrible "drawings" that have no life or personality, the others are perfectly fine with it. As a charcoal loving, graphite-stained-hands devotee, I feel that not only is the ART of drawing being downplayed as some meaningless, trivial task, but it's also insulting the students intelligence.
The reason, I'm told, for the tracing is to maintain the student's confidence. To me, it sounds like people just don't want to try and TEACH the students how to draw. What about the students who decide to go to a University and get a fine arts degree? You may not like to draw, but there's no way those drawing teachers in those drawing classes that you HAVE to take are going to let you trace. How are you going to trace an image in your brain onto a canvas for the beginnings of a painting?
I'm curious of what other people think, so if you're reading this and you have an opinion, let me know. Do you think it's okay to use tracing in this way?
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