When I start a painting, I have been shuffling the underlying drawing in and out of Photoshop. I have decided if I’m going to “cheat ” in that way I might as well cheat all out.
The easiest way to cheat while drawing is to base things on a photo, print it out in sections, and then use carbon paper to transfer the image to the canvas. Then I figured if I was using old-fashioned carbon paper, I may as well go really old school. To that end, I began researching ancient tracing techniques, like the camera obscura.
Then I got really hung up with the idea I could turn my guest room into a camera obscura as this artist did. I have all the supplies.
Of course, there are other alternatives. They also sell the camera lucid a, but my research on that amounted to one word: uncomfortable.
I realized that if I worked from a photo I could try a cheap software option instead, so I bought the Camera Lucida app. Essentially the app lets you superimpose a photo image on top of your canvas, so you can look at those two images simultaneously, then put your pencil on the canvas, and trace around the photo you see in your iPhone viewer.
This is what I want to paint next.
It’ll be interesting to see if it works.
2 responses to “New Ancient Device”
I will be very curious to hear about your experiences! (getting the lines in the right place: definitely a useful potion of the process, but also definitely not all of the process when oil painting…)(well. Or anything else, I suppose, unless the picture is all very high-contrast; you also need to decide as an artist which lines go in, and how to represent smooth rounded surfaces that don’t have natural lines on them, etc.)
KC – I feel guilty using the Lucida to draw and the palette picker to do the colors. it feels a little like I’m making an AI paint-by-numbers.