Tracing, everyone is tracing, the cool kid at school is tracing,
Johannes Vermeer, Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, tracing, tracing, tracing, tracing!.

And the people who tell you that tracing is not an art,
are all about pretending to be better than you, by preventing you from becoming good art art.

And the people who convinced themselves that tracing is bad,
draw crooked, and no! it is not their style, doodling crooked is not an art style!

"No sir, it is not! a good portrait of your sweetheart,
because the nose is too far down and a little bit too the left ... and her decolletage starts not, right beneath her chin."

You eve meet anybody like that,
you show them this poem, and run away.

There are only two rules to tracing,
practice on Mona Lisa, and when you are done practicing only trace photos that you took.

Pull up a photo of Mona Lisa, grab a piece of paper, put it on your screen,
very gently make mark all the important parts.

Now use a pencil, to darken what needs to be dark,
use the edge of an eraser to make hard edges, later get an eraser shield, and a battery powered eraser, maybe.

and roll up some paper to make a Tortillon,
and blend your pencil to make it photo realistic, and get a pack of Tortillons as well.

Your piece of paper is most certainly the wrong kind of paper,
so you need to buy drawing paper, not sketching paper but drawing paper.

Gently trace the Mona Lisa off your screen again,
but this time, flip the paper over, and put some pencil on the back - deposit some graphite, to make home made carbon paper.

Now place your home made carbon paper on the fancy drawing paper,
and go over the trace you made on the screen.

The graphite you deposited on the back of your home made carbon paper,
will now transfer over to your drawing paper, get some graphite paper, so that next time you can put it between your trace and drawing paper without doodling on the back.

And now get art pencils, school pencils are just one shade of pencil called: HB,
but there are actually 20 shades of pencils, and that is how you darken things for real in a drawing.

As to oil painting, first you mix opaque gray or brown colors, and create a portrait in black and white,
and then you paint over it, with transparent see-through colors, and that will slowly color your grays.

But focus on drawing first,
you learn by drawing.

When you are ready to trace your first commission, or friend, or family portrait, consider using a projector,
as you take their photo, you must absolutely, re-create Leonardo da Vinci's shadows on the Mona Lisa.

Painting or drawing without those shadows, is wrong,
the shadows, you can't have sunshine without shadows, you drawings will not come out right without the correct shadows.

Art is fifty percent creation, and fifty percent teaching,
you must pass on what you have learned onto others that admire your work.

Finally, never create art that is sad, never create art alone,
do your portraits in a coffee shop, your paintings on a street corner, and your photos on great adventures.

You are now a Beautiful Artist,
you were a Beautiful Artist all along!