Did TikTok Just Teach Me Something?

November 22, 2022 5 By Sydney Winterholt

As many people do, I was scrolling on the infamous app, TikTok while taking a break from some school work. As I was scrolling, wasting away time I suddenly found myself watching a video that was sharing some interesting information that I could use towards my learning project. I liked and saved the video so I could come back to it for reference. When it came time for me to work on my next drawing I remembered this insightful experience I had on TikTok and made my way back to that video you can watch it to by following this link.

In case you did not follow the link to watch the video, the quick TikTok taught me how to outline/trace a photo. It really is quite simple, I mean it has to be since the video is less than a minute long! From my previous learning experience from TikTok with my learning project I did not have a positive review from learning with TikTok as that one did not go as smoothly as this one, which you can read about under my ‘A Stressful Sunset With TikTok’ blog post if you haven’t already. This TikTok explained how to use the technique with three easy steps. These steps included: (1) Inserting a photo; you do this by going to actions, click insert a photo and select the photo of your choice; (2) Go over to your layers and lower the opacity of your photo and then create a new layer; (3) Trace your photo; select your choosing of a stylist and start your tracing. Then you are finished! But to get rid of that photo you traced, all you gotta do is go back to your layers and unclick the little check mark of the photo layer and tada you have your master piece!

For my project after tracing it out I decided to take it to the next step and attempted to colour it in. This is were my master piece I would say turned into being practice. It still turned out looking good however I think I would have chosen a different stylist/brush. I would say that I am still proud of how it turned out and I will definitely want to try this method again. I really enjoyed it as it was quite relaxing although I did get a bit frustrated in the colouring process just because I felt as though I was making it look worse and my perfectionist side kept trying to ‘fix’ it but nothing I tried worked. Even though I thought about just removing the colouring aspect out of it to post about I thought that colour makes everything better and it is about the process and not the product so I will post the fully coloured drawing I did. The photo on the left is my creation and the photo on the right is what I was trying to recreate. Let me know what you think in the comments!?

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