I'm in a ranting mood and I've had a few discussions about this, and there's a lot of controversy around the subject, so I feel like dropping my 2 cents into the pool.
Obviously, if you want to learn to become a better artist, you need to practice. You need to draw, you need to study, you need to understand how things work. Some people completely forget about the concept of tracing.
First of all let me say I do not condone tracing in the sense of copying a person's work and posting it as your own, or altering someone else's work and saying it's your own. What I'm speaking of is only from a practice standpoint. Keep it private.
Tracing can