...
Well, I'm gonna be the spoilsport here but no, completely useless as far as I am concerned. Progressing in Art is long, difficult and tedious. Learning to deal with frustration and accept that to do great things you'll have to spend hours on end doing shitty stuffs is part of the journey.
Confidence is not born from doing pretty things, it's born from doing shitty things day after day after day for years and seeing the improvement as you go along.
If you start trying to take shortcuts at this point just to "feel good", how are you gonna deal with what's ahead? There's colors and lights and complex perpective and composition to learn as well. Are you gonna use an eyedropper tool everytime you try to work on a reference instead of training your eyes to gauge the colors? I know somebody who did just that, and she's been doing the same thing for over 10 years. Since she works in photo manipulation, that's ok for her professionnaly but these past two years, she's been trying to really improve her drawing and painting skill and she's not moving forward. Obviously when you've got a full time job, studying on the side is tough and dealing with frustration is way more difficult than somebody who's learning full time. And she never truly dealt with how frustrating line drawing can be, so she sort of stays in her area of comfort, not regressing, but not truly moving forward as fast as she could if she could just accept that sucking is part of the deal if you want to become an artist.
Anyway bottom line, I'm no expert in anatomy, but I've been working on it on my own for a couple of years now (You can see part of my imaginative poses without references on deviantart:
https://www.deviantart.com/la-plume/gallery/all ) and it's long even if with experience, I can tell I didn't suck as much as I thought I did when I started (though I've still got a long way to go and I'm planning to take extra classes this year).
Finally, I wanted to show you one particular illustration I'm currently working on:
https://digitalpainting.school/members/la-plume/gallery/creation/77685
This one was done using a photo reference (obviously the photo didn't have clothes nor the shovel). The position I decided to draw is slightly different than what was on the photo originally.
But what I want to show you is
THIS
As I said, this was done using a reference ( not tracing the lines obviously). The picture in black is the relatively final sketch ( I still made some changes after), the sketch in blue is the original one, the sketch in red is the first revised version and the second revised version and relatively final is the black one.
As you can see, the differences are small, but only a trained eye can see why a position works and why another doesn't. I originally didn't see what was wrong, a professional pointed me that my perspective was wrong initially... But it was obvious to me it wasn't that because I sort of had followed the original picture I had seen... BUT I must have had done something that made that professionnal see the problem... and it's because I'm used to REALLY observe and draw shitty stuffs that I finally figured out what I could slighty modify to get something correct (actually there are more changes that should have been made but it involved much more work so I settled for correct instead of good). The changes are subtle but only hours of training can give you the eye to discern what changes needed to be done.
Even with a reference, you can make mistakes so nope, want to progress? Accept that there's absolutely no shortcuts. What's hard today will be easy tomorrow, or the day after, but if you start using shortcuts just to "feel good", it will remain hard. Plus, what's your end goal? Feel good? Or improve?
Doesn't mean that you can't relax from time to time with tracing if you like it... But consider those recreations not learning times.
Good luck on you artististic journey!
