AdderXYU wrote:the other option is to neither live-nor-hand-trace. It would save everyone a lot of trouble of having to defend themselves.
You know, the only reason anyone has to defend themselves is because there is a real attitude here that use of this tool is beneath 'artistes' somehow. Yet, the level of artistry exhibited in the derby otherwise, is for the most part laughable. A few people do some fine work. Edgar McCherly comes to mind. So too, Tgentry. Some on occasion use tracing as a tool to get their idea across, given the time constraints. I can't believe that any question of my use of tracing by anyone with bonafide credentials would occur. As we say in the photoshop contest every week, "Use Photoshop, linoleum blocks, pastels, MSPaint, cave painting, tattoos, tribal scarification, whatever,". The point out to be that you use the right tool for the job. My idea, which frankly I recognize is a corny joke, but one which has a really distinctive look to it, and isn't distracted by some convoluted justification to make it fit with leap year, required that I get a Sunstone, put a crack in it and stick in an extra day around the edge. In order for it to be the joke it should have been, it needed to have a reasonably real-looking stone. I couldn't use an SVG of the SunStone and just paint in whatever colors I wanted, it needed to look like stone. That meant, considering just how complex an item it is, that I had to either draw it by hand, or trace it, kind of like how Cho did his time travel dinosaur, and his kid on the airplane. So I made a good quality Susntone with a crack and extra piece, and then started to trace over that image; I quickly realized it was going to take until probably Tuesday to get it done. I also realized that it would look good with only 3 colors, including the black shadows. So that's how I made it- I used Vector Magic to get the dark brown and the black shadows, and used my own drawing from my photochopped source of the lighter highlighted portion of the stone. Most of the time and effort put into the design was the critical part- making the high quality photochop of the cracked stone with the extra day stuck into it, and the hand tracing of the highlights of that image so that it looked right- unlike the look of live tracing.
I spent all afternoon Friday working on it, and then that evening, finally going to bed about 1:30 AM, when I had done all but the Vector Magic trace. I did the trace on Saturday morning, in next to no time, prepared my background of the shirt design, and my closeup image, and submitted it that morning. I daresay, few entries in the derby, if any, required more effort than this one did, and frankly I'm pretty annoyed that you would persist with this 'attitude' about tracing. Drop the attitude, and we won't have to defend ourselves for tracing at all.
