Only if you are using it as a study aid. >trace art >draw over it, breaking traced image into shapes, muscles, or values This is useful to reverse-engineer how others make their art work. Other than that tracing is not useful for learning, unless you want to learn to trace. Ultimately you still will have to train your eye, muscles, imagination, and coordination between all of them. Tracing won't help with that. Only putting your nose to the grindstone and earnestly practicing will.

It really depends on what level of skill you're at. If you are literally just starting out, I mean literally have never even doodled in your life, sure. Plenty of artists I'm aware of did tracing as a child of their favorite cartoons to distribute around. Did they learn to draw better? They probably get better muscle coordination, but other than that, you're not going to learn anything helpful. Why? Because simply you're looking at a finished product and just imitating the final result of what is usually a much longer drafting and revision process. As an analogy, imagine trying to learn how a car works by watching one drive down the road. No matter how much you observe that car rolling by, if you actually want to understand how it works, you will have to rip it inside out and figure how every little piece relates to every other little piece to make it move. Going back to the art, you'll have to ask yourself "okay, well if I were to do this, how would I first make sure the pose is right in the rough so I don't have to adjust it a thousand times later?" and "How do you use shading the way he's using shading? What does it imply?" will help you understand better how to do better. You should try to emulate great art you like, but that's not tracing. Looking at your favorite artist and saying "How do you physically move your hand to make that line stroke?" Or, "What exactly is he doing with the colors to make it look so good?" Stripping it down as best as you're currently mentally able, and attempting to mimic what you're seeing will help.

OP here. >>5297 I did this quick study of some faces from Jim Kim (character designer of Big Hero 6). The top is traced and the bottom is what I drew from reference. I clearly lack a sense of depth and an understanding of perspective. I need to practice much more. >>5300 Checked. Very true, and a good analogy.

I'm not interested in tracing other people's work as I don't think one would learn much doing that, but I study other peoples' work regularly. I will say that tracing anatomy drawings vastly accelerated my knowledge of anatomical vocabulary, as well as my understanding of their proportions and placement on the body. In removing drawing itself from the equation-but still tracing along the drawings in the book, imagining their forms and reciting their names out loud-I accomplished what watching tons of video lectures and reading many articles and paragraphs on the subject had not. In a week or so I was able to visually identify probably over 90% of the muscles that form relief on the surface of the body, perhaps excluding many of the muscles of the face and forearms. To that end I would say tracing has been among the most successful educational tools I've used thus far and I would recommend anyone to use it in a similar fashion.

So to elaborate slightly-I'd say tracing as a foundational approach to the base knowledge of what the different anatomical features are and where they are ("vocabulary" and "geography"), followed by rigorously drawing these anatomical features through the use of 3D models, isolated photographs of figure models etc. ("geometry") is a good study plan. Multiple different methods to further the understanding of the same complex, general subject.