May I say that I am highly confused about you thinking that retracing is bad?
Because I very much disagree!
Disney's Snow White was retraced (which - in animation - is called rotoscoping), just as one example.
There is NOTHING bad about retracing.
I would instead argue about references like this:
If you used any and feel like they "betray" in one way or another, admit that you used the reference.
I mean the following with that statement:
If you retraced (eg. you took a cover from a superman comic and made it a new character, but kept the pose, etc), say so (ideally with a link to the original) so people are aware of it. I have NEVER seen people seriously complaining if given proper credit. The biggest issue I had seen was that one original creator requested the artist to take the artwork down since they didn't want to be used.
And even those are quite few (unless it is a very blatant copy, of course, which then is less reference and more art theft).
I have studied three years of art education and am currently another three years into Digital Art and all my professors were perfectly fine, if not even sometimes encouraging, to retrace.
Sure, IDEALLY you can sketch a pose from a model Or, if you don't have a model, from a photograph.
BUT certain things are almost impossible to understand unless you retrace. A good example would be foreshortening. Especially when someone is weak in proportions and perspective, it is unbelievable difficult to properly foreshorten, even when sitting right in front of the person. And it can be equally unbelievably easy to UNDERSTAND foreshortening, when retracing it.
Which is - in my view - the main reason why anyone should retrace every so often and NOT be emberassed about doing so. Retracing is a incredibly helpful thing to learn. To learn proportions, muscles, expressions, perspective.
I mean, I assume most here at least heard from famous european artists such as Vermeer, Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci. They all used a machine called "Camera Obscura" which literally allowed them to retrace landscape (they got a picture of the landscape projected on their paper and then could retrace it, that projection was later used with light-sensitive material to create photographs).
NOBODY would ever dare say that Vermeer or Leonardo da Vinci are bad artists or something. And they retraced. They never used those tracings underneath their actual images, but they did studies with them to learn.
ALL references in general should be used like that.
If you sketch random people in the subway, maybe one pose or clothing style totally catches your eye. DON'T use literally that sketch, use it as inspiration to make something awesome with it. THAT is what referencing is. And nobody should ever be ashamed of referencing.
If anything, people should be ashamed if they claim to never reference anything because that is straight-up lying, even if they believe themselves.
One of my professors once said on that topic: "To work without references is like driving blind. You might arrive at your destination, but it will take forever and might leave you with a broken vehicle." If you work without references, you either have yeaaaaaaars of experience to simply pull it out of your mind or you're just doodling. Anything else would simply mean you're not taking what you're doing seriously.
I had loads of concept artists from companies such as Ubisoft and Pixar hold lectures in my university and ALL of them at one point showed files with HUNDREDS of images and music that inspired them, that they referenced.
Don't think of references as bad.
Think of them as tools. Use them, learn from them and one day maybe move away. But not using a tool that can make you a better artist is simply shooting yourself in the leg. Why obstruct your own growth like that?
