I am cheating on this one.
I’ve taken a photo of the still life:
… and used Photoshop to slice it up by primary colors to guide what color I glaze, and how much. (Of course, I’m not making the vase on the right that dull color that blends in to the background.)
Since I’m cheating anyway, I flat out printed the photo and traced it on to the canvas. Judge me if you will.
And even with cheating, the top right where the arm of the right vase meets the lid is wonky already. Remarkable. Can’t even cheat right.
7 responses to “Weekly Paint Progress: 12/19”
Yeah, I’m not quite sure how the upper chunk of that right vase did that. Maybe next time you “cheat”, you can “cheat” more effectively by tracing the lines you want in Photoshop and then printing out that line-drawing to trace over?
IKC – I think the carbon paper tracing was too faint, and when I went over it again with charcoal I extrapolated the wrong angle.
On a recent project that was a photo->line->trace-that-onto-fabric->embroider, I made errors at literally every step of the way, so I hear ya. (on the plus side, I fixed *some* of the earlier errors at later stages, but… oy.) I had forgotten the manifold failures of carbon paper.
KC – there are devices you can buy that will project a photo on top of a canvas. I think I could only use that if I made a stab at freehanding it myself first. But with embroidery you can just trace on to tissue paper, fix it in the hoop along with the fabric, and then embroider directly through that, can’t you?
I go for the use-the-laptop-as-a-lightbox method, binder-clipping the fabric to a clear clipboard, putting that in front of the screen at full brightness, and then going over the lines from the computer screen in pencil. But there were a lot of lines (so: one can miss transferring some of the oddities), and the fabric weave fights you if you’re trying to trace an almost-but-not-quite-horizontal line. Also, I have amazing powers of Messing Things Up. 🙂
KC – that’s pretty cool. I never would have thought of that.
It’s sort of a natural progression from the “use a window” method, and makes sense particularly when the “art” is digital, but obviously only works if you’re tracing onto something that’s translucent enough that you can see the lines. But yes, I was very pleased with how effective the method turned out to be – especially since it doesn’t require any fabric stabilization other than binder clips (or a pairing of binder clips and masking tape if the fabric doesn’t reach all sides of the clipboard), since then there’s no “will it or won’t it wash out okay?” question.