How i approach making a painting pt.1

Hi there! Thought id share a little bit about how I make my art! Id say its just a little bit of an unusual workflow - but ive always been a believer in doing what works best for you and using what you know! I suggest making art as fun and approachable as possible and cut out any of the habits that make you enjoy art less. There are seriously no rules and no right way to make art ^w^



Soooo. I first usually sketch out all my paintings on my computer. Saves me a lot of paper and time lol. Because I'm comfortable with blender from my time learning how to animate, i use the grease pencil tool to sketch pretty much all the art i make, which might seem a bit weird haha. But blender treats all the lines you make as 3d objects that you can rotate, stretch and move around easily. And that makes it personally easy for me to touch up my rough sketches and get it to a version that I'm happy with the quickest! My art usually takes me a long time to do so i take anything that speeds up the process for me



Now when i have my finished sketch, i still have the problem of getting it onto my canvas! To do so i just have to print out my sketch on paper so i can transfer it. But the issue is i need it to be to scale with my canvas size and i need a way to precisely print out my sketch into large pieces that all fit together. I first measure my canvas (in this case, it is 16x20) and then i put my sketch into a google docs page. Going into image options you can precisely resize images in google docs which is a really great tool, and you just plug in the canvas' size into the fields. If you're working on a large canvas, the image will be far too big to print on just a sheet of copy paper. In this case, it makes sense to divide it into 4 pieces of paper so that each piece of the image would be 8x10 (half the length and width). From here you copy the full sized image 4 times, and then crop each one to size using the rulers on the sides of the document as guides to gauge where to crop. When you have all your pieces correctly cropped and scaled, then u can print!

Now if you're just painting on paper, find yourself some sort of light source to place underneath a solid transparent surface you can write on and put the pieces of the printed sketch on top to create a light box to trace onto the paper with. If you own a lightbox already, awesome! I use a kids Crayola art tracing light box thing I got on sale for 5 bucks at a craft store lol. I used to use a piece of plexiglass with my phone flashlight underneath for a short amount of time which was so rough haha. But it worked! In this case, if you're using a canvas, the material will be too thick to shine a light through. So you're gonna need a charcoal pencil and some sort of semi transparent paper (either parchment paper or transfer paper). Flip your printed sketch upside down and use your light box to trace the reverse lines onto your transfer paper using your charcoal pencil. Just be sure not to smudge up the lines with your paw while tracing. Then flip the transfer paper over and align to where its supposed to go on the canvas, and then as if you were creating a leaf rubbing, go over each of the lines with a dull regular pencil and color the lines all in, especially applying force so that the charcoal lines stick to the canvas. When you peel away your paper, the lines should be on the canvas!! Repeat and eventually you will have your whole sketch transferred (How about that!)

Then from here on out its time to paint! I think in a another post later i will describe my personal workflow when it comes to painting <3 its always an evolving process im figuring out. But i hope this helps anyone interested in trying something similar themselves but doesn't know how to really get started with it. Otherwise i hope it's at least interesting!! If there's any steps that seem inaccessible to you personally, experiment! Problem solve your way into finding your own unique work flow. I believe in youuuu :3

-bunnymutt