You've Got Modern Tools for Drawing

Artists have always used the latest technology to help speed things along in the painting process. Ali Kay, Ep.61, has found one tool in particular that has helped her with her drawing. And the good news, you may already have it in your home office.

It’s your home printer. You can use it to transfer both small and large images to your painting surface.

Put it to Practice:

Kay has two suggested approaches based on the size of your finished painting.

If you’re painting smaller, you can print out your reference the size you want to paint it on a single sheet of 8.5 x 11 copy paper. Then use transfer paper to bring the important shapes over to your surface.

Kay recommends you don’t bring every shape over. Just the ones you really need. This will help keep you from getting too tight and from trying to do a full reproduction of your photo. Remember, you’re trying to create a painting… not a photograph.

If you are working larger than one sheet of printer paper, you can take advantage of a print setting called tiling. You send a large image to print and the printer will divide up the image into several pieces of paper so that it can print off the whole image.

You’ll then tape those pieces together and, again, using transfer paper, transfer it to your surface.

Both take a little patience and getting used to. But at the end of them, you will be able to trust that the image you have on your paper is in fact a real representation of what you’re trying to paint.

Side note: In the Podcast Art Club, we’ll be spending the first week of August trying another method for transferring, the Grid Method. Learn more here.