Thorin Acrylic Painting Progress

Well, I admit I had been working steadily on this project and then… we got sick.

Christopher, myself, and my mother-in-law even, all came down with chest colds. Ugh. Cough-your-head-off, sneezing loudly (and strongly enough to feel like you were pulling muscles), lasting a week or two icky colds.

Being sick and miserable are not how we prefer to spend holidays or vacation time, much less both.

Worse still, all progress on everything came to an absolute halt.

I’m hoping to get progress moving along again though. I had picked up a few supplies I needed, as well as prepping the canvas. I also did a little Photoshop editing on something that had been driving me nuts. I’m hoping I managed to smooth that out a little, even if it’s not completely fixed.

Today, I took the new printout of the Thorin drawing, flipped it over to the backside, grabbed a 6B pencil, and scrawled all over the back behind the drawing. Once that was finished, I taped the printout to the front of the canvas, took something that would stand out (a red Prismacolor pencil), and traced over the printout. I had to carefully go back over a few spots a couple times (with a sharpened point), because the transfer is very light.

The printout of the drawing, taped to the canvas. There is a heavy coating of pencil lead on the backside, so when I traced over the printout lines with a red pencil (so I could see what I’d gone over and how dark), it left a light mark on the canvas.

And light pencil marks are what I want. If you remember the practice color study, the printout was very dark mostly-permanent lines. While I will be touching up the canvas transfer with a pencil to make sure I can see the guidelines and to fix anything that didn’t quite make it, I still want all the pencil lines to stay just visible enough for me to follow while painting, but to be easily covered if I want.

You can see the pencil lead on the back of the printout, and the light transferred drawing on the canvas. I still need to go back over (lightly) some of the marks so I can see during painting, and fix anything that didn’t transfer smoothly. But it is a fairly quick and easy way to get a drawing onto the surface you’ll be finishing.

It’s been a long time since I needed to transfer a drawing to canvas. I used to have these HUGE sheets of thin transfer paper, but the process I used was mostly still the same. Just, no scanners and printers back then like I have now (thank goodness)!

Still, I really hope this will be the last time I have to deal with “drawing” this picture, even though I still need to start painting it. While I do tend to do things the hard or long way ’round, this particular one has been an especially annoyingly repetitive chore. It’s gone through a lot of changes though — from a tiny, barely-there scrawled sketch, to a hopefully soon finished painting. Fingers crossed, anyway…

I’m also reminded that 2015 is coming to an end, and I will need to do my usual recap. I have a feeling I will need to make sure I remember that there were a lot of distractions and changes this year, because the “finished” pile is a lot lower than I wanted.

Maybe that just means 2016 will make me want to get to those unfinished piles a little quicker though!