Chris and tracing

Tracing is an art technique where another piece of art, or portions of it, is copied along its outlines. Among legitimate artists, it is little more than a technique for studying drawing styles of existing pieces of work, or for making variations of the artist's own work, but in the Internet, it has regrettably become a road to stardom for many budding artists; among certain people, making a copy of a drawing or parts of it and trying to pass it off as their own is considered a legitimate strategy — at least until someone finds out about it.

But the drawings are still poor!

As Chris's art skills have shown, Chris can't really draw anything well. It is therefore highly surprising that many of his drawings are actually traces. Usually, the biggest tell-tale sign of a tracer is inconsistent drawing style, particularly between works that are demonstrably bad and "original", and high-quality drawings that are strangely reminiscent of other pieces of art. Chris fools everyone by having a very consistent art style — albeit a consistently bad style. Whether this is actually a conscious ploy is debatable, more likely is that Chris fails at tracing, a "technique" even mediocre artists can (and do) employ.

Tools of the Trace

The bad style is explained by the fact that his tracing tools are just as top-notch as his other art tools. Chris uses a toy-like sketching kit from Spin Master called Reflecta Sketch (not quite the same color scheme, but you get the idea), which only allows him to trace on basic letter-sized copy paper, not the large sketching paper most professional artists use. The kit comes with a reflective piece of plastic where an original can be placed to the left and the reflection is used for tracing an outline, allowing Chris the ease of copying other artists' works to use in his general and Rule 34 artwork. This device is why many of Chris' tracings are a mirror image of the original. By comparison, most Internet tracers seem to just use graphics apps, drawing on layers atop original image files. Some of the badness in certain images can be explained by the fact that he's just copying poses and outlines by eye, rather than using any tool for this purpose. Of course, simply tracing poorly doesn't justify wholesale theft.