Icarus Step 2
There are many methods available for transferring a finished drawing, sometimes called the cartoon, onto the canvas, panel, ceiling, or whatever other surface an artist may choose to work on. Often, the final painting is designed to be much larger than is convenient for working out the details of the drawing. This is usually the case for me. When it is, I have most often used a grid system to simultaneously transfer the drawing and blow it up to the correct size. Other painters may use a projector or a large format photocopy machine and a charcoal or paint direct transfer.
With this study, I originally intended to paint on an 18 inch square canvas, well within the size range for drawing full scale. In the end, however, I ended up opting for a slightly larger canvas, 20 X 20. I decided to make use of available technology, and took my finished drawing to Kinko’s where I enlarged it to 20 X 20 and lightened the lines. Fortunately, I had the foresight to make a couple copies. I first employed the old standby for direct transfer, a charcoal transfer. I’ve used this trick many times with great success. Basically, you coat the back of your drawing with a nice even coat of charcoal. Then the drawing is carefully taped into place on the canvas. By carefully tracing over the drawing with a nice sharp pen, the drawing is pressed onto the canvas.
The only drawback to this method is that not only is the transferred image likely to smear or brush off, the charcoal can also tint the paint that is applied over it. So the drawing has to be fixed in some way. The best way, though by far the most time consuming, would be to trace over the drawing with thinned paint or india ink. The easiest is a light pass with a fixative. This works well enough, but is not exactly archival. I decided to try a light coat of dammar retouch varnish. This fixed the drawing, but not for long. Since this was meant to be a quick lighting and design study for the wings, I originally intended to leave the background unfinished. Rather than have the figure surrounded by a field of plain, flat gray, I hoped to put a nice warm, mottled wash of burnt umber over the canvas before I started painting. Unfortunately, the wash lived up to its name and completely washed the dammar coated drawing away. The color and texture it left on the canvas were lovely though.
I decided to use the setback as an opportunity to work on perfecting what I think would be the absolute ideal in direct transfer, a technique I was exposed to at the Grand Central Academy, the oil transfer. I’ve tried this technique a few times before, and although it worked well enough to allow me to complete the paintings, it was sloppy and inexact. A perfect example is this oil transfer I used while painting ‘Contrast’:
You can see what I mean. The drawing is there, but the line quality is inconsistent and blurred. The painting turned out beautifully, but I had to stare at this ugly drawing the entire time I worked on it. More problematic, I had to spend much more time reconstructing details with paint that should have been worked out in the drawing. Very time consuming.
What I ended up doing was taking some ideas from the charcoal transfer and applying them to the oil transfer. It seems obvious now, but the problem was that in applying the thin layer of Burnt Umber oil paint to the back of the drawing, even with a nice stiff brush, the thickness of the coat was varying just enough to result in unpredictable transfer to the canvas. So, I applied the paint and then, as I would with charcoal, I spent 10 minutes carefully wiping down the paint layer with a paper towel, smoothing it out and working it into the paper. The resulting transfer was light, but perfectly crisp and as close to the original drawing as could ever be expected. Best of all, now the only materials on the canvas are oil colors. No charcoal, no retouch varnish, and certainly no fixative.
Burnt Umber is a ridiculously fast drying pigment, so I would be able to begin painting as early as the next day.
Tags: Bryan Larsen, Icarus
