Is Tracing allowed? - art blog

On TikTok I see more and more people complaining about how tracing is bad and evil, but there are a lot of misunderstandings over this topic. I am an animator with a degree in animation and video. And I will explain some copyright rules and differences about when tracing and or rotoscoping is allowed.

Tracing is simply tracing over other people's art, usually easiest done in digital art, where you can download any picture and just trace on another layer. There is nothing inherently wrong with doing this. The opposed even, it is very good to learn this way, you can study different art styles and get a feel for them. It becomes bad when you start to post that art and claim it as your original piece. You are allowed to post it if you give credit to the original piece and explain that this is for training. But maybe you have changed some things, only traced the pose and made your own character, isn't that allowed? kinda, as long as you give credit to the original piece, and explain you got the pose from there.

Now on TikTok I had a big discussion where I defended an artist who was blamed for tracing. What they did was take an online video of people dancing and traced the movements frame by frame. THIS IS NOT TRACING, this is an animation technique called rotoscoping. The best known rotoscope video is the music video of Take on me by A-ha. If you rotoscope you still have to give credit to the original video

Disney uses this a lot too, in This video you can see the side by side of the life action and the animation for a song in the movie Hercules's. And here is a short video with more examples from Disney. But It's not just the 2D movies here's a video of Johnny Depp playing Rango.

But wait, why does Disney then not have to give credit to the original video's?
Well, Disney paid people to act for them, they the videos they traced are already theirs.

So if you take videos of yourself to rotoscope you don't have to give credit, if you let other people act for you, you need their permission to not give credit, or pay them.

so in short, if you make something yourself, all good.

Trace or rotoscope over your own art, all good.

trace or rotoscope without giving credit, but you're not posting is somewhere. all good

trace or rotoscope others media and giving credit, sure (unless the artist specifically stated otherwise)

trace or rotoscope others media and not giving credit / claiming it as an original piece, nope

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