Drawspace lesson J04: How to transfer an image from one sheet to another.

Another method that's supposed to make an artist's life easier is tracing and retracing the image. Lesson J04 suggests another method like that. Basically, you take an image and transfer it to another, cleaner sheet of paper. What you do is you turn the sketch face down and give its outline a thick rub (without pressing too hard). After that you place it back down on a new paper and go over the original outline. This should leave a new outline on a new paper.

To do that I took one of the sketches I made during this program and printed it out. 

Since the printout was good, the outline was visible when I flipped the paper over. Here it is. I did the rubbing using the 2HB pencil. You can even see it's a turtle. 

I did the tracing with a red pencil since I wanted to see exactly where I did or didn't go over the sketch. I did consider the red pen but then decided not to. 

This is the final outcome.

As you can see it is very light and gentle. The original outcome is even lighter then here; I had to Photoshop it so it could be more visible.

Tip of the post: when using this method use only a newly sharpened pencil otherwise your retrace will have a thick line like mine, and that's not a very good outcome.

When I finished reading the lesson I was pretty skeptical about the necessity of this method. My first doubt was weather the rubbing would leave its marks on the paper beside the tracing itself. Second - is there something beside the need to have a neat image? And then it hit me: this method gives you a chance to draw and alter the image over and over again! And what's the good in that? I guess I'll discuss it in a separate post.