1b. Creating the Drawing.

It seems simple enough. Getting some type of drawing on a canvas so you can start painting something. Well, its not all that simple. Allow me to complicate it for you!

You know you can just skip the drawing if you want to. Some painters just start with something like one loose brushstroke. A stroke that might give them an idea for what might come next. They put another brushstroke down, and so on. Eventually, they have a painting.

That technique might just give us a wonderfully orchestrated painting of color and form without trying to be anything other than just color and form.

A painting could be the artist's vision of a dream from the night before. It could be what the artist remembers his or her surroundings to be as a young child. The best dream....or, the worst nightmare. Anything is "fair game."

But, I need a little more structure than that. I like to record something in a specific place and time. Something many of us would recognize, but maybe haven't seen it from how my eyes have seen it. I need a drawing!

Thus, getting a drawing onto the canvas only pertains to those people who want to start with a drawing in the first place. And, that included me. But, there is still the issue of Art vs. Technology when we have to decide just how we are going to accomplish this drawing task.

What I am talking about is to what degree an artist uses technology to put the drawing on the canvas. Some artists wouldn't even consider using photography and image transfer the way I do because they have been told by art teachers that it takes all the creativity out of it. Hogwash.

I know how to draw. From my schooling in Architecture, I know a lot about drafting, perspective, shadows, reflections, proportions, blah, blah, blah. As a creative director, I supervised my company's move from the drawing board to the computer. Technology became my friend as well as my enemy. If it can help me get there better and faster, I'm in.

I want to paint!...

I want to get that drawing stuff out of the way so I can start putting paint on canvas! That buttery, wonderful mixture of linseed oil and finely ground pigment, squeezed from a soft metal tube, just like in the old days. I can't wait to get my brush in it!

So, how do I use technology to get my image on the canvas anyway?

I trace! ............Oh no!......isn't that cheating? A student of mine at the Rockport Center for the Arts once said to me, "I didn't know you could cheat." Bill was a retiree from up North living on the Texas Coast. He had never painted before. But, he was an engineer and very detail oriented. His daughter was a photographer and he had a photo she had taken and he wanted to paint it.

He had the choice of spending countless hours trying to draw the image, or he could use technology to get it on his canvas. He tried my method and his very first painting from my class was beautiful and looked real! One class is all it took. Now he paints regularly. Is he cheating? I don't think so, and neither does he. There is so much that goes on after this stage that makes a difference. The drawing is certainly the foundation to support what comes next.

So, how do you do an eight foot tracing?

First, you have to have something to trace. Duh..... That means you have to take your photograph and enlarge it to the actual size of your painting. There are several ways to have your image printed.

Being frugal, I used my plain old HP color printer instead of paying a service to run a full size print on paper. It is also very inconvenient where I have been painting. But first, you have to get your photo ready for your printer. Here's how I do it:

I open my photo in Adobe Photoshop, crop and size it to the dimensions I want (8 feet wide) and save it as a tiff file. Then, I create an 8 ft document in Adobe InDesign and drop my tiff file into that. InDesign allows you to print out the photo image in a tile format, meaning that the printer spits out multiple pages, with a little overlap, until you have the entire image divided into pages.

This photo below took 42 pages. Once you have this stack of pages you have to tape them together. No small chore for a beginner! There are small corner marks on each page that have to line up with the other pages, top and bottom. Get this lineup just a hair off and that hair multiplies across the pages until it becomes a quarter of an inch on the other side. Once you realize how important that is, you will be a lot more careful taping them together.

Here is how my printout looked when taped together. I have it taped to a large glass window in my studio, which backlights it nicely. The dark pattern of lines are where the pages overlap.

Once I have this printout, I roll out my tracing paper and tape it to the front. Then I start tracing. Now this is where the lines between tracing and drawing start to blur. When you are tracing, you have the choice of what to draw and what not to draw. You also indicate what goes in front of what as the lines stop and start. You can't always see this in a photo.

Here's what the whole tracing looks like. I have it taped to another large glass window in my studio, so its backlit also.

Since I lost my early photos of my tracing when my hard drive crashed, I can only show you what the tracing looks like after I rubbed #2 pencil on the back of it. It first just looks like a lot of lines.

In this closeup of the red boat below, you can see the darker lines on the front side. I adjusted the brightness and contrast of the photo to see the lines on the front better. I had to look at the photo and make my decisions as I traced as to what went in front of what. I had to draw on my understanding of how things work and how things are put together, since the photo didn't always give me the right clues.

Here is a photo of the red boat in the scene as it appears on my printout papers:

You can see here that the aluminum tubing on this boat has pretty much gone all white without a lot of detail, although when you are standing there looking at it, you see more. Again, camera vs. eye. However, I have to admit that when I am doing my tracing, I always have my laptop next to me, zooming in on the area of the photo I am tracing, since the monitor screen shows more detail than this printout can.

My time spent fishing on these types of boats, and thus the hours of lull while waiting for a strike, allowed me to study what is what and why the rigging is the way it is. All the aluminum is custom-made, so everyone's boat is a little different, yet all this stuff has similar functions in the end. You wouldn't know it, but artists are thinking about these things all the time.......really.

Now look at the same boat after I have painted on it and have it almost finished.

Notice the sign behind the boats on the roof of the building, "Fishing Trips." I think this will be the title of this painting when completed. I brought it around to my side so I could show it. Here's the actual sign as seen from the road. Also notice that I took out that horrible new orange and yellow shopping center in the background. Artist's license you know...

When people see my method of tracing, the first question that always comes up is, "Wouldn't it be easier to use a projector?" Well, no. Not for me. It wouldn't be as good. When I decided to start painting large after years of not painting, I went down to the art supply store and purchased their best projector. Digital projectors were too expensive, but basically project the same type of image.

I had been using my tracing style for a couple of paintings and thought maybe the projector would be better, faster, or whatever. What I found was that the projector had to be used in the dark, meaning that the lines you were tracing did not show up well until you turned off the projector and turned on the lights.

No matter how good the projector, when you go up to something like eight feet, the image is softer than my printouts. Thus, you didn't have an exact line to trace. God forbid that the projector accidentally moved just a hair. Getting it back in the exact place you had it was almost impossible. So, the next day I returned the projector and went back to the way I had started.

Next time I will quickly finish talking about getting the tracing onto the canvas, blab some about my paint, brushes and color palette; and then move on to actually putting paint on canvas!

As one rep from a large web printing outfit in Ohio once told me, "Its all just about ink on paper." Hope you join me for the next installment.