Did I make the BEST ART COPYING TOOL??!

in this video i test out a tracing method which i bought for 10 bucks off ebay made of cheap plastic which actually works really well but has its limitations so stay tuned until later in this video when i decide to try and use our laser cutter and acrylic and mdf and reflective paper and lights to make the ultimate tracing board but hey let's get started with the humble beginnings all right let's face it we're all looking for shortcuts in life and tracing or copying images is one of the shortcuts in art that sometimes is a little tempting and necessary see i've tried a lot of different ways some of which are through gimmicks like the the lucy drawing tool or the camera lucida i think it was called i don't recommend it we're going to discover a new method today that i've never used before but given that this was a 10 listing on ebay and i'd never heard of this method before i'm going to bet it's not revolutionary but i i have to try it this is how it comes this is it wow the scaffold is spliced as shown in the figure sure at least this will be fun good for you as it was for me so let's start it with the way that it's advertised in this picture with a phone and the screen like this let's do something pretty straightforward with like line work invincible just came out the uh amazon animated series let's uh let's do the main character from that that's my reference oh actually it is reflecting in a way that makes it look like it's flat on the table and the thing that's interesting is it's not moving based on where i am we've got the image there let's resize it to take up a bit more space in fact yeah we'll just do this guy's face oh i'm hesitant to say that i might find this cool let's let's see okay there it is on the paper i just wanted to check the alignment and if i point here that's the nose i can see that that's the nose but so can you which shows me doesn't matter where the observer is the reflection is consistent this might work people i'm just gonna go for it it's a fairly simple one to copy it's actually really clear what okay what i'm finding really weird and cool is that every single camera angle is seeing the exact reflection and the drawing i'm doing [Music] it does get hard to read in the darker areas for example here behind the text where the hair is quite dark but the words behind it are black it's clear to us looking at this where the lines are what the distinction is whereas as a reflection it all just sort of melds into one ooh and i just removed my reference so i'm going to find out if it's hard or really easy to put it exactly back where it was and really easy so i'm not going to get it perfect with the hair i think the key is going to have to be finding higher contrast references so i'll just sort of make up a little bit but i think is our starting point i mean that's our first one for a double i'm genuinely impressed anyway let's let's amp this up a bit because that was a cool test we're starting to see what works well let's do something classical i'm going to type classical portrait i mean this lady looks cool she looks a little sassy like how can i go brighter than that zero i guess if i like blocked some light there that does make it a little clearer not the most convenient way to trace but if it works so i'm going to try and go a little stylistic with this i'm going to use the same expression and pose and stuff but i'm just going to modernize her with just like just some of the little details the thing with lines is like the littlest line position change makes a huge difference so like where do i put this jawline when there's a clear sort of difference in the shading ah that wasn't good that was bad all right it's line shading now it's hard to do at least i can rotate it but then it wobbles look at her mouth move on her face if like line shading works it's easy enough to wait nope at the position ah just not that one we're going horizontal draw someone in a reclined pose drawing that looks so painful i'm going to skip line work and we're going to uh i'm going to go a little more artezani all right so this g i sort of i keep finding myself wanting to like look at the original to see what i'm actually drawing especially where like the hair and the mat are overlapping it's really clear in the original because i just can't see it in the reflection find myself just wanting to make some stuff up just because try and copy it exactly it means that i'm just slowing down to verify everything against the original and then it's just like i'm just gonna draw it there's this broken knee there's this bone poking out there you go all right i have to veer direction i have to change course of this video i want to figure out how to make it work as optimally as it can this is a nice cheap little double 10 bucks from ebay great decent proof concept i want to be able to put an artwork on this and trace an artwork first of all we need to make this but bigger you know what that means here we go hardware store [Music] size is the first thing if it's at least a four tall and wide we'll just make it square then it's not going to be so big that if it's on i thought that it's awkward to draw so the longest side of an a4 piece of paper in both directions and we'll just cut a square out of that first things first i want to see what the angle is [Music] okay we have transformed this crap do this i don't know if it'll work but it's gonna be cooler if it does well done jeremy about applause for our in-house cad designer thank you i don't know if it works yet fingers crossed [Music] oh my god the piece of paper under here let's copy this guy there's like a double line thing happening can you see that do you know what do they have thinner acrylic i'm going to do your favor i'm going to snap my fingers and the pain of having to go buy the thinner acrylic and laser cut it and bring it back in here it's all going to disappear there you go we went to the hardware store got a thinner one we're also cutting our new frames i'll put that together that's going to take a while to cut but the real question i'm trying to answer is does this give you the double lines this is the thinner acrylic yes it helps it's still got the double lines it actually makes one of them stronger part of me wonders if it's because this is slightly discolored like that's a clearer one but i guess there you go look on the paper like the one we had was clear this is a little tinted so the double line's super clear but because we have that slight tint one of them is clearer than the other which makes me wonder then if it's gonna be even better if we add these things we bought oh my god this is the fun part of the video the little tracing thing nah let's get creative making our own making it better you know what else is fun every other bloody video we do on this channel so do you know what actually uh while i think of it i mean if i were watching this video i'm like that sounds fun what do i do if i want to join in more of that fun oh like like like click like and you know what if you subscribe you're in for even more good creative fun times this is my sample piece this one which looks darker but it's also a mirror finish let's find out that's more just to see oh my god it's a mirror no but you can i can see like that's still like okay let's let's test oh my god this is the perfect way to trace we cracked the code so we got it we got so we're gonna wait it might be too dark on this one this might be silly hey look at that all right that's all i'm gonna get that oh really it's a mirror isn't it [Music] this is the v2 i feel like a mad scientist with an assistant who did all the work all right you ready slots in there beautifully i can see the i can see the paper maybe a little better lighting still feels lower it's interesting i don't know if you can see it's not flush it's this the page has to come forward there's nothing to it but to just fine tune to find the exact right distance and put it in practice one last time to put this to the test to see if we've invented the best way to trace so with all the different elements of my final big reflection tracing system improvement design thing done i went about refining all the pieces to make sure that my final version would be one that works really well starting off with the screen or the mirror the reflected transparent thing i started from scratch and reapplied a fresh uh version of this contact reflecti stuff i just hate the bubbles and it's really really hard to get rid of all the bubbles and i got help from jeremy to perfect it as much as possible to much more neatly trim around the edges and even that was a bit rough so i actually sort of just taped around the corners just so it wouldn't lift up over time and would just look a little bit nicer and i think the effect in the end is pretty effective then let me take you through a bit of a recap of our design iterations for the big stand of the reflective thingy starting off with version one which was built to hold a much thicker version of the acrylic which as we discovered had sort of double lines because of the thickness of the acrylic so that design was no good version two had a much thinner slot for thinner acrylic but we started to discover that there was this height differentiation where it started to feel like the page was below or above uh the table creating a little bit of a parallax when copying version three we tried to solve this problem and we made it worse but in the opposite direction it looked like the page was floating above the table at the end of the day it just all came down to the angles and we discovered that through a little bit of this trial and error that the intersecting point at which the angle of the surface of the reflecting plane of acrylic meets the table has to be the point at which the uh the angle of where the paper rests which is being reflected from needs to be in line with i guess maybe maybe a simpler way to put it is that we have three places where there is a flat image the place on the stand that we're placing the image the plane of reflective acrylic which is reflecting the image and then the table itself all of these three things are on three different angles but all of them have to emerge from or or spread out from the same intersecting point and have the angles between those be exactly the same and that is eventually what we figured out and this is the result version four which i also thinned the stands out a bit so that i could stand a piece of a4 up vertically or horizontally and with a piece of reflective acrylic that is both transparent and highly reflective i can in theory which i'll put to the test right now copy any image i want from an a4 piece of paper and i'm going to say this worked like magic i did have to place some lights behind the reflective surface because without a little bit of under lighting it's just a little too hard to see what i'm actually drawing or where my hand is i have to say it was really fun to take this core concept and see how far i could take it how effective i could make it and it was also really cool to prove that it works with paper with physical illustrations as well as the original concept i think the reason the version i bought off ebay really advertises as copying from a phone is because the phone display really lights up in a way that enhances its reflectiveness on a piece of acrylic that wasn't very reflective so it just wouldn't be good at tracing paper whereas by creating this system with a more reflective acrylic surface and a little bit of that underlighting not only do i practically get a mirror from the illustration that i'm tracing but i also get a window through to where i'm drawing but at the end of the day tracing and copying is tracing and copying and the only thing you're going to get good at by doing a lot of tracing a lot of copying is tracing and copying it's not going to make you a better drawer it's not going to replicate the original perfectly no matter how good you get it it can be a useful tool perhaps if you want to alter the original or introduce new elements or simply take a portion of it or i don't know there are certainly practical benefits to it but it's not going to teach you anything and really i think the reason i got so carried away in this video isn't because i want a great way of tracing or copying it was more just trying to see how far i could take that concept but i have no practical use for it aside from making fun youtube content and i honestly don't see much practical use for neither the original version of this mechanism nor my recreation amplified version of it for artists day to day if you want to trace a copy use a light board or learn to do it with a grid system or with your eyes they're the most worthwhile ways of doing that are going to give you the most benefit in the long term as far as training your eye and your skills but with that said it was very fun to see how far i could take this and frankly very satisfying to see how well it [Music] worked so there we have it i was worried at the start of this video that uh this wouldn't take me very far as far as entertaining you guys and making some cool stuff because as you saw i was very restricted in what i could do but by being a little inventive and a little crazy and with a little help from jeremy i think it was really fun to take that a lot further and create a way of copying and tracing that works with traditional as well as digital mediums as you can see it's mirrored like i said in the voiceover this is uh it has limits to its practicality and at the end of the day you can't just copy the original it will never be the original if you want the original just buy the original which is why i'm selling my original art that was a really good segue good job man cool thank you thank you for those of you who don't know i'm actually running an auction selling 170 plus lots of original art to help fund the kidding out of my new studio which we're moving to in a month or so this is the biggest moment of my career and any and all of your support and help along this journey is going to make all the difference this piece is actually a sketch from my video on how to sketch and it's actually up for auction today or tomorrow by the time this video comes out same with these pieces you might remember this one from my uv paint video not only is it one of my favorite illustration pieces that i've done in a long time but it's two pieces in one because it glows in the dark and turns into a different artwork when the uv's all lit up then we have angelo the freaky haunted choir boy from the creepiest character design session challenge these and so much more are up for auction they're originals there's no copying on people but there are also signed prints up for grabs which you can grab too so that if you have a favorite artwork that i've done you don't have to miss out and it still has that personal touch as a big thank you from me to you for supporting my journey in this big moment for us on this channel so go check it out go to jazzyauction.com check out all the lots and the auctions there's nine lots per day up for auction for the next couple of weeks i'm selling over 10 years of my work because i'm so excited about the next 10 years and i think we're gonna make even crazier more fun stuff but speaking of crazy fun stuff i hope you have enjoyed this video this was a really fun project that just kept escalating and i love how it worked and turned out and if you did please hit the like button and consider subscribing for more fun with art and creativity there is a lot of crazy cool fun art stuff to come but until next time i'll see you later

Channel: Jazza

Views: 634,695

Rating: 4.9682655 out of 5

Keywords: josiah, brooks, jazza, jazzastudios, animation, newgrounds, flash, humor, drawing, adobe, photoshop, Artist, Painting, challenge, funny, crazy, weird, draw, art, entertainment, hillarious, bob ross

Id: U_Z55BLrCrI

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021