Transferring the image to canvas
I’m a little behind in my blogging, so I thought I would try and catch up some now. I’ve just returned from the Conversations in Art + Innovation event sponsored by Creative Pinellas and it made me think about how much this grant to help me realize my large Not #MeToo painting project means to me. Thank you again for the financial support for this large project! I am hopeful that it will show well at Art Prize 10 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, this fall and that people will be moved to vote for it if they’re in town and have downloaded the Art Prize app. (More on how the voting works much closer to the event.)
Back to how this piece is being created now: I last left off blogging after coming up with a drawing that I was content with and the next step was to photograph the drawing. After I edited the jpeg file in Photoshop, I had a digital file that I could take with me to my place of work, St. Petersburg College, and there I could project the drawing onto the large pre-primed canvas that I had purchased online.
I projected the drawing onto the canvas so it would show up actual size (the finished painting is 7 feet tall and 14 feet wide) and then I used burnt umber paint to transfer the design onto the canvas. It looks a bit like the sinopie drawings that Renaissance artists used to transfer designs onto walls for buon frescoes a long time ago:
Here you can see the transferred design in burnt umber on the canvas in the painting studio at St. Petersburg College, Clearwater, FL. The surroundings give you a sense of the large scale of the work.
After the canvas was dry, which did not take long, since I use Golden Open acrylic paint, I rolled it up and brought it home to my 10-foot by 10-foot studio. Since I could not work on the entire piece in my studio, I kept the right side of the canvas rolled up and started working from left to right for the first pass with full-color paint in the rough-in stage of this piece:
Here, you can see how I unrolled the canvas and set up my tabouret to get ready to paint! Madeline (on the right) is currently rolled up.
In the next blog post you can see how I did the underpainting of this work! Until then, thanks for tuning in!
To see my entire portfolio of paintings, please check out www.kevingrass.art! You can purchase original paintings and fine art print reproductions directly from my website.
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