Monday, January 9, 2012

How to transfer your image on a canvas?

How to transfer your image on a canvas? 
I recently held a three hours oils still life workshop, the students were from starters, amateurs and professional artists and the number one question that was asked is how to transfer the image to a canvas? or how to start painting?

A) There are many ways to transfer a picture on a canvas, the easiest way is to use carbon paper. For those of you who are more mature (older) like me you should remember or know what carbon paper is. Yes you can still buy it from art supplies stores, ACMoore, Michaels, Pearls, Jerry's Artarama, Office Max, Staples etc...
      

1) Enlarge your image and printed the same size as your canvas. Most printers print 8 1/2 by 11 inches the size of a piece of paper. If you are not as lucky as I am and don't own a large format printer or plotter you will have to play around with the standard printer. What you have to do with a standard printer is split your image in different sections, take the image and crop different sections like the top right side and save it as imagenameA,jpg then do the left side and save it as imagenameB.jpg etc until you can take the different sections (tape them together and cover the whole canvas, you will have to experiment until you get it right.
      2) Next step is to tape (scotch or masking tape) the carbon paper face down on the canvas, make sure you cover the whole canvas and don't worry if the carbon paper overlap. Tape the image over the carbon paper on the canvas and center it the way you want your painting to look like. Use a pencil, pen or an object with a sharp point to trace the picture, press hard while tracing just make sure that you don't put a hole through the canvas. You can test how the image is going to transfer before you start tracing your image by drawing (tracing) a small line on one of the corners and pull carefully the corner of the image and the carbon paper to see how the line was transferred. Trace everything, the more detail you have the easier it will be to paint.

B) Another way to transfer your image is to create a grid. Make sure that your image is proportionate to the the canvas, for example: the canvas is twice the size of the image or 4 times or 8 times the size of your picture etc.... If they are not proportionate the transfer will be distorted.
    
 

1) Place a ruler at one corner of the picture and connected to the opposite corner and draw your first line, do the same to the other corner. Draw a horizontal line at the center of the picture where the first two line crossed each other, now do the same by drawing a diagonal line through the center of the picture. Now you have 4 different squares, do the same to each of the squares and keep on doing the same until you have many small squares.
       2) Do the same to the canvas so you can have the same grid with the same amount of squares on the canvas, make sure that you are drawing the correct image on the corresponding square on the canvas.
       3) Now you can transfer your image by drawing small square by small square, when you are done step back and you will see your entire image in the canvas. You do not have to erase the squares off the canvas, you can apply the paint right over them. Now have fun and start painting.

C) There are many other ways to transfer images on a canvas, will talk about them later and let me know if you have a preferred way of doing it.

Looking forward to hearing your feedback, Ezi
Don't forget to check my website: http://ezistudio.net