Getting your Drawing onto your Canvas Perfectly Every Time! Paint More, Struggle Less

so you're ready to do the painting of the horse huh the only thing you have to do first is get the drawing on the canvas now are you ready to go do you have your canvas oh there it is and I see you've got your pencil so now it's just a matter of getting ready and diving in oh this is gonna be fun oh there's nothing like drawn Hey done already well that was fast let's see that beautiful drawing of a horse uh-oh what happened well don't worry what if I told you there was a way that you could get your drawing perfect every time on your canvas that's right and I'll show you how to do it all it takes is a little bit of know-how and a few dollars wait dollars yes dollars [Music] Avery Peters it's great to see you back in the studio lights are on coffee's hot so let's get going I would have to say that by far the biggest question of the week that I've had is how do I get my drawing transferred onto my canvas in order to do some of these complicated story paintings or just any kind of painting that you're doing you want to spend your time on the front end doing the drawing and not have to struggle with getting it on to the canvas well that's exactly what today's video topic covers so sit back relax and watch me struggle here we go just so you know what the various steps are that you're in for today let's go over what we're going to be doing first we're gonna figure out the drawing size so it's going to scale up proportionately to your canvas size and we're gonna do the drawing and then we're gonna take that drawing and scan it into a drawing program using I'll I know Photoshop so that's what I'm going to be using you can use whichever program you'd like then we're gonna order the print from the local copier we'll chalk the print and tack it to the stretch canvas bar we'll do the transfer and then seal the drawing with liquid and that's it but there are a number of steps in the Photoshop portion of this and so I think it's important that I tell you exactly what you need to do and how to do it at least to the best of my ability and so onto the first step how to figure out your drawing size that will scale up to match your canvas size one thing we have to cover before we go any further is getting the proportions of your drawing to the same proportions as what your painting is going to be so let's say for instance your drawing is like it is for this one it's that big I mean your your painting is going to be that big but you need to do a smaller drawing how do you know what size to make it well I know what the size of the original is that I'm going to be doing so let's say on this one it is 60 inches high and it's 30 inches wide so I know that but I need to know what size drawing I'm gonna do how do I figure that out basically to figure out what we need is we need to know at least one of the sides of how large we want it on our drawing so on this one I'm going to make this 10 inches wide why well because my scanner board only is 12 inches wide now I'm going to piece this together I'm going to scan it in two or three pieces I know that I can't get the drawing any wider than 12 inches and I'd like to have a little bit of extra play so we know that it's going to be 10 inches wide what we don't know is what the what the height of it is gonna be and that is where your phone comes in now I used to I used to use the equivalent of a slide rule in fact I still use this handy little tools called a proportional scale but I'm gonna show you one that isn't gonna cost you any money basically we're gonna go and get an app for our phone go into the Play Store or iTunes Store or wherever you go in here type in proportional calculator these diff all these different options will come up what we're looking for is something let me bring this up for you is something that has this formula to it a over B equals C over D any of those will work I have three of them installed they all do the same thing but I just wanted to show you that basically any of these will be fine let me go ahead and go back so here are the three that I have loaded let's just bring one of these up okay and so what this is is we know what the height and the width is of our final painting and we know what the width is of what we want the drawing to be what we don't know is what is that height so let me go ahead and set this down and we'll put those numbers in the width of this is going to be 30 inches the height of the painting is going to be 60 inches and we know that the width of the drawing needs to be no larger than 10 inches so we're going to go ahead and calculate that and it tells us that the height of our drawing where the proportion of the drawing needs to be 20 inches high by 10 inches wide now that's a pretty simple calculation but let's just say let's just say that the width of the painting is 36 the height is 24 that's a good standard size and let's say that we want the width of the drawing to be 12 point 12 and a half inches what's the height going to be well you calculate it out and the height is eight and a third you'll get it nuts on every time that's how I came up with using the particular proportions of this drawing hope that helps well here's the image I'm drawing the drawing is turned on its side because it's so long I thought it would be easier to see I'm going to be using the proportional divider on this because this drawing is coming up 300 percent from the original size to the canvas and if something is off just a very small amount now once it gets blown up it's going to be a very large amount later so I will check my measurements just to make sure that they're where I want them and need them to be and I would recommend doing something like that because it's going to be way off if you increase it that large of a percentage and it's not accurate I'm gonna go ahead and skip ahead take us to the end of the drawing because this is really about the transfer process not necessarily a drawing video so let's go ahead and move on well here we are in the photoshop portion there's a number of steps but I'll go slowly we're gonna start by doing some scanning and then we'll take and merge everything and true-up the edges but to start in Photoshop you go up to your file menu you go down to import and over to images from device this will bring up your scanner control panel and you'll be ready to scan it should look something like this make sure you select the part of the image that you want name it and hit scan this image came in sideways so I rotate it by going to image image rotation 90 degrees clockwise and that'll bring it around to the way it needs to be so once I did that I saved it gave it a name made sure I could find it again and saved it as a JPEG now this part is very important because you're not going to be able to to merge your three different scans together if you don't have them saved off you may be scanning your drawing in in one pass and so you won't need to do this but eventually if you're gonna use this method you will be scanning in pieces and stitching your your scan together so it's good to know this and I continue scanning just like you did on the first one I scan the bottom portion and I've rotated back around make sure that I save it off and then I do the same thing for the middle portion of the scan so that Photoshop can go ahead and stitch them all together but I need to make sure that I save all three of them off and have them rotated in the proper orientation so that it can do its job so I know that this seems like a lot of steps but mostly you'll probably be scanning in one pass you won't have to worry about doing the stitching but it's good to know how to do this and once you get the steps down it goes very quickly you don't hardly even have to think about it after a while so don't let this intimidate you so now it's time to merge all three of these together you go under file automate photo merge that will bring up your dialog box and one of the things that you're going to make sure that you check whenever it comes up is this Auto and the upper-left you're going to have it automatically do its thing and we're gonna go over to the add open files and it's going to tell you that you have to have your your file saved before you it'll come up and that's where these will come on board and you can see all three of the files that we added there and just click OK and it's going to do its magic now we're used to have to do this manually and it was a lot more difficult than it is now I love this feature so here's all three of the files you can see them and Photoshop automatically creates a mask and it merges them together seamlessly so make sure that you flatten the layers once they're all together and look good and from there we're going to go ahead and square things up wearing and saving the image off so that it can be emailed make sure your rulers are visible to do that on a Mac you type in command R or ctrl R on a PC and you'll notice that the measurements come up along the outside of your window and just drag out your guides you start by by pulling out from where the the actual numbers are and do one for each side now things are not going to be square at the moment but that's what we're going to do now we're going to go up and get the marquee tool and make sure that it's set to fixed ratio the way I'm showing here and type in the proportion of your particular final size which for me is going to be 30 inches wide and 60 inches high and then starting in the upper left hand side I'm gonna drag down until I come to very close to where those guides are and then holding down the command or control key next to the guides I can move any of the guides that are in the wrong place just over a little bit is all I need to do for the one and now all of the guides will tell me exactly where I need those corners to be and I can deselect by hitting command D or ctrl D or just going up and selecting deselect which would be under select in the upper left you'll see the very first tool up there that's your move tool go ahead and select that up in the menu go up to edit down to free transform you'll see these boxes and then in order to to make these corners do what you want them to do freely you hold down the command or the control key in the corners and you can move them right to where those guides are very easily once you get it to do what you want you hit return it'll lock in those transformations to get rid of the guides just go up to your menu to you down to clear guides because we don't need them anymore let's go ahead and crop off the excess around the image so select your marching ants tool or your marquee tool and draw a box around your image so it's just a little bit larger than the image itself then you go up under image crop and that will crop off that excess and go ahead and deselect the image by going up to select deselect the next thing we need to do is make sure that the image size is where you want it to be so I'm going to go up under image image size and we're going to make sure that the resample box is checked and you want to put in the height or the width either one of the actual size of the image that you want it to be so for me 60 inches high 30 inches wide the resolution falls to whatever it is at the time then you uncheck the resample box and we're going to bring the resolution down so that it's going to be in a better size that you're going to be able to email it I'm starting with a hundred pixels per inch it's good place to start but I'll check it once I save it off and see if it's too large now I'm going to be adding in an extra inch on all sides because in the past when I've asked them to do it sometimes they will and sometimes they won't so this way I'm sure they will I'll explain a little farther into the video why this is a good thing but for now let's just go up under image canvas size and make sure that the relative checkbox is checked and we want to put in an inch on on all sides so we're gonna do two inches for the width two inches for the height that'll and make sure that that little dot is in the center that'll split the the extra that you're putting in there the canvas extension color should be white and then click OK and there you go you see you've got the extra so now we're going to put a little holding line around that so they don't crop it off the easiest way I found to do that is to select the rectangle tool on your tool box there and draw a rectangle around close to the outside but in just a little bit and then we're going to select the brush tool and we're going to select the brush that we're going to use to put that line around that path so select the hard round and be your second brush down and bring the size down to roughly between 3 & 5 pixels you just wanted to to show and make sure the opacity is a hundred percent to bring up the path panel menu go up to your menu to window down to pass and it will open up you'll see your work path that you drew make sure that that is selected and highlighted and then click the second icon along the bottom that will stroke the path and if you click off of that path you'll notice that that there's a line around it and so this will just keep your image from being trimmed closer to the edge than you want it to be it'll give you a little breathing room so now that it's time to save things off let's just make sure the image is as small as we can get it go under image mode make sure it's grayscale that'll get rid of any extra information you don't need and then we're going to flatten the image to make sure that it is able to be saved as a JPEG under file save as or yeah save as then go down to JPEG make sure that you name it make sure you know where you're saving it to and once you do and once you do that just go ahead and click Save now it'll bring up the I had already saved one it'll bring up the JPEG dialog box and it'll show you the size of your image now thirteen point four Meg's for me is too big to email so I'll go under image size and I'll reduce the resolution down you need to make sure that you leave the height and the width to the size that you want it so I'm going to reduce the image size down to a resolution of 75 and then I'll go ahead and save that off again make sure that everything is checked as as it was before click Save replace and it'll bring up the size now 7.7 Meg's is small enough for me to be able to email it yours probably won't be anywhere near that large this is the second largest transfer print I've ever done so here should be probably around two or three Meg's and so just to be completely thorough here's what I write on my email instructions okay just to be clear put your phone number in not X's and O's and the final size you want your print to be and of course replace your name here with your name okay hey everybody welcome back to the studio we got a working day today so I'm in my t-shirt I just got back from FedEx office formerly known as Kinkos this is the print that we just had done of the drawing this is done to the size that the painting is going to be and I've marked on here the edges of where the painting is and I also give an extra inch or so on the outside of this so that I can put my chalk down and not have to worry about going right to the edge and getting it everywhere is it's a mess so anyways I will show you how we're gonna go ahead and use this let me get a few things I need to open this window and I need to get my canvas that's already been stretched so that I can show you how this is all going to work alrighty well here is the canvas I'm going to be working on why am i working on such a large canvas you're gonna ask well first of all I was gonna do this painting anyway so I thought it was a good time to get started on it and second of all I wanted to show you how you even doing ass a relatively small drawing as long as you do the proportions the same you can blow this up to a pretty big size and have it be very accurate for you that's an important thing to know it's sure is going to make the painting process a lot easier I think once you start doing this this is a nice way to go it probably takes a little bit of the romance out of it for you but as long as you do the drawing this is all you you know you're using this technology to help you get where you need to go I think I think that's enough talking let's get to let's get to working okay here we are over at the window you can see what's going on with the print here I've taped it up onto the window I've taped it backwards so that the back side is to us because that's the side we're going to be putting the chalk on now all I'm doing this for is because I don't want to have to waste a lot of chalk and to spend a lot of extra time putting chalk onto areas that I'm not going to be doing it transfer so right now all I'm going to do is trace around the outside of her form up around the mountains and around the backside of her form that's basically it that's all I need to do on this one now if you're doing a small painting it doesn't matter you can chalk the back of the whole thing very easily there's also another product that you don't have to even mess with chalk comes in a roll it's called Sorrell and it's basically charcoal pre charcoal paper very thin tissue paper that you slide between your drawing and the surface that you want to transfer it to and then you can you can use that let's go back over to the table and we'll go to the next step okay so I'm going to show you everything that you need in order to do this we're going to need a book that's roughly the thickness of your stretcher bars of the width of your stretcher bars mine happens to be about an inch and a quarter and so my Norman Rockwell Bible will suffice with that but you know any kind of book that you have that's thick enough will work just great so and I put this behind the canvas so that it gives it a little bit of a structure so you're not pressing down and stretching out the canvas so there's that you're going to need a couple of pens it helps if you have different colors so there's that you're going to need some obviously some chalk I like to use new pastels this particular color happens to be Indian red you can see it right there the number on this is new pastel 263 - P so that's normally the color I use so you're gonna need that I move that out of the way you're going to need three thumbtacks pushpins nice and sharp so that they give you a good bite your going to need you need to go into your doctor's drawer cuz I know you play doctor and you're gonna need some gloves this happens to be latex you don't have to have this but it's going to keep your hand nice and clean okay moving on a couple simple additional tools scissors a little bit of vanilla bean lip balm sms stretchy wire and last but not least of course you'll need a good slightly used if not brand new stethoscope okay good now on to the transfer alrighty here we go we're all set up you know thinking back to to the supply list I may have gone a little bit little overboard probably don't need everything that I mentioned you could probably leave out the the vanilla bean lip balm so and if you haven't figured out by now you can't believe anything that I say and only about half of what you see so okay let's go ahead and get going on this now this is on carpeting so I put down a nice flat hard surface you can do this wherever you've got a nice flat surface I'll just go ahead and pick up one of my one of my new pastel sticks here and open it up the glove was serious about that we need this just because it it makes smoothing this a whole lot easier and I know with my wife what she's in the room when I do this it's like nails on a chalkboard to her for some reason she just doesn't like does not like the sound of a hand rubbing over paper so luckily I've locked her in the other room and she won't be traumatized by this at all so let's just go ahead and start rubbing this down it'll be a little bit difficult to rub down until you get there's like a little bit of an outside coating on this pastel stick but once you get that opened up it should go nice and easy for you and so I'm just following along that outline that we made and I'm not going to make you watch me do this whole thing let's go into ludicrous speed now I just wanted to say that on places where there are a lot of details like the face or the hands I like to make sure that I have a an extra amount of the chalk in that area I should also mention you want to make sure as you're rubbing this down that you try and keep it flat if you turn it on its side sometimes you can tear the paper not a big deal but it's just something you should you should know about okay okay all done with that look nice clean hand thanks to the glove except for that and and that well let's just move on bring up the canvas now on the back of this canvas I've got a this stretcher bars obviously on the outside holding the canvas I have a nice interior bar that keeps the longest side from coming in this really is important if you're working on a large painting to put this cross brace on because you'll find once you pop this into a frame if you don't have one of these this side is going to bow in because of the of the tightness that you've got going on with this canvas I really do recommend having these cross bars so but this book will be behind the stretcher bars here to help give it that extra solidity that we need so that's nice and sturdy normally on one of these what I'll take and do is and I'll just bring this down a little bit so that you can see the top of it normally what I would do on something like this is I would have the whole image here but on this one I did not get the top of this but I'm just going to show you as if this were the top of the painting how I would attach it so here's your stretcher bars right right along here it's the edge of the canvas and that's where these nice little push pins come in you would line it up exactly where you want it to go and you take this pushpin and there is a lip of wood that the canvases is wrapped around here at the very edge you take this pushpin right into that very edge and you do it in all three places here and then that way it's not going to go anywhere and once you get this and let's say you're you're working on it and you you need to have some of that drawing back for some reason it got obscured and and you're not feeling confident and just putting it in yourself if this were off you could just simply take find your push pin holes find them here line them up and it would be back in exactly the same place so you never have to worry about whether you've got your drawing because you always have your drawing does that make sense all right I told you a little bit earlier if you know if you missed something just go ahead and and rewind it but you know what there aren't that many of you here right now so if you if you have a question if I've gone too fast just go ahead and raise your hand and and I'll stop and I'll cover it again if but you have to raise your hand high because otherwise I won't see you so okay and none of that kind of thing that's it just irritates everyone else okay moving on I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to attach this just like I showed you but I'm gonna do it down at the bottom here I'm gonna turn it around for you so you line these corners up with the corners of your canvas make sure that it follows the edge along here make sure it's all lined up like it should be take your time measure twice and cut once or something like that I'm not a math person I don't know whether I told you that or not but I read a statistic once that four out of three people problems with math and so I just happened to be one of those all right so let's go ahead and put our pushpins in put them in nice and deep and tight all right and then one in the center and that'll spread out all of that force all right here we are all ready to go that's probably not the best camera angle but it's the best one that I can get to today but I think you'll be able to easily see what's going on here so taking my pen my green pen and moving this canvas around so that I know that my book is where it needs to be you just start following the lines and so I really recommend you know until you get used to how hard you should press just lift this corner up and look underneath it and see if it's dark enough and if it's not dark enough you press just press harder and if it's too dark for you back off on a little bit also every once in a while check your double check your pushpins make sure that they're not coming loose I mean you've got three in there they're not all going to come loose at the same time but always a good idea you finished okay I got everything transferred down one thing that I will mention is it's always a good idea to have two pens with you my green pen died halfway through luckily I had this beautiful pink pen to finish up with so let me show you exactly what I did I'm gonna lift this up here this is the transfer underneath here I'm gonna just go ahead and pull this off that's the bottom part and I'll bring it up here I'll get I'll try and get some b-roll of this afterward but what I want to show you right here is that I had a little bit of of a change of heart whenever I started to transfer this down let me go ahead and I'm gonna grab the camera and I'll show you what I did and the whole time I was doing this I have to say I was less and less convinced that I was gonna get a pleasing result if I didn't go ahead and put an intermediate step in there and redraw her face and it's one of the problems when you're working a little bit smaller and you bring your drawing up let's say 300 percent that's a pretty good sized increase and any imperfections that you have at the small size are going to be magnified at this very large size I took the print out that we had and over the top I did this sketch here and just worked out exactly what I wanted until I was happy with her and then I had the other drawing down in place I put this one down over the top of it until I found where it looked exactly in place and then I went ahead and taped it down I flipped this back and chalked the back of this brought it back down then I did the transfer and then now I'm happy with her face she looks exactly the way I want her to I will always be a hundred percent honest with you guys when something works and when something doesn't here's the bottom line I want to work out all the problems I can on the front end so when I get to painting I don't have to worry about a problem with the drawing and she just wasn't there so I went ahead and and took care of that now and I don't have to worry about it the rest of her went out went down just fine with that transfer but I just wasn't happy with with how she looked she was close but I just needed to do some tweaking so let's go ahead and get this baby sealed okay we're coming down the homestretch this is the ceiling of the painting is the last step but before we seal it we need to get ourselves some liquid original and I poured a little bit into this container here and then I just put a small amount of either mineral spirits or I like to use gamsol to just thin it down a little bit and use this little chip brush here mix it up real good make sure that you don't have any clumps or lumps anything like that and then we're ready to go ahead and get started on sealing this baby so thanks for you you're still there right oh good okay the last thing I'm going to talk to you about is the brush to use for this you can use your standard chip brush like I did you know they're not even a dollar at the hardware store it's hard to get a thin enough coat using that so I would either recommend getting a nice house painting brush this one is smaller for doing smaller canvasses this is the same brand but it's larger does a really nice job very smooth but I don't use this one as much anymore because I got this other one I think it was at Hobby Lobby I can get that there it's not an expensive brush but what I like about it is it's thin and so you don't lose a lot of the liquid into the bristles of the brush most of it gets on to under your canvas and so you're not wasting a lot so whatever kind of brush you choose to use just make sure that it's a soft one okay all right so let me get this out of the way and we're gonna go ahead and get started the whole canvas needs to be coated even not just the drawing not just the drawing part it needs to go down evenly and throughout the whole entire canvas from edge to edge okay so let's go ahead and get started and I'll speed this up you so I'm not putting a thick coat down at all and if I find that there's too much of a pool on the surface here I go ahead and brush that off I just want to see I always like to have a light source across from me and then that way you know how that is you can you can see the surface that's wet because it shines more so that helps to have a light on the other side of where you are okay now I'll just talk a little bit when you're going over your drawing you'll probably get a little bit of smudging but you want to have a very light touch and and that will give you the minimal amount of smearing so I'll just go ahead and and go over it as few times as you can you want to leave most of that chalk where it's at but some of its going to move that's just how it is it's not a big deal you the softer your brush you're going to disturb the drawing that's down there that's another reason why I recommend having a nice soft brush those chip brushes can can disturb this drawing down there and you don't want to have that happen after you spend all that time and the reason why you want to coat the entire canvas even though you you know you may not have Chuck over the whole thing is you want the surface to accept the paint in the same way all across the canvas and it won't do that if you have part of it coated and part of it uncoated it's just going to absorb at a different rate and and it's gonna you're going to fight it a little bit until everything gets covered in so it's just best to have the whole thing coated covered and protected normally you don't have to wait real long especially if you put them this really thin coat it may be dry in a couple of hours especially if you were to take it outside here in Arizona and put it in put it in the Sun it would dry really quickly and I have done that before but definitely will be dry in the morning overnight so you do this the day before you're going to be painting then you'll be ready to go that next day just take a look across here see the shine I don't want any pools I think that's it then go ahead and set this up well repeaters we've come to the end of another one I will show you how I finish her in another video down the road but until then I hope you found this video helpful I really did try and keep it as short as I possibly could but as you can see there are a lot of steps but they're very simple and if you follow them you'll be able to get your drawing down onto your canvas very easily and it'll become second nature in no time I can't thank you all enough for showing up thank you for subscribing thank you for all the likes and all the shares you guys have been phenomenal the channel is growing so quickly and I thank you so much for that but it's time to turn off the lights and close up the studio for another night so until next time as always I'll see you down the road [Music] rooo

Channel: Steve Atkinson Fine Art

Views: 91,859

Keywords: drawing, drawing tutorial, transfer drawing, oil painting, oil painting demo, oil painting tutorial, steve atkinson, draw paint repeat, plein air, fine art, fine art tutorial, drawing demo, oil painting tips

Id: NemjLGSNhUU

Length: 42min 50sec (2570 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2019