BACK TO SQUARE ONE - DRAWING TRANSFER and FIXING TECHNIQUES
(i) Pricking and Pouncing - (traditional)
Only suitable when your drawing is the same size as your intended painting.
Take a pin or needle and prick holes along every outline of your drawing, wherever necessary to render sufficient detail.
Your holes should be very close together. Closer together on sharp curves but to save time they can be further apart on straighter stretches.
Next, place your drawing directly onto your painting surface. Take a dry sponge* and cover it with coloured chalk dust (darker colours show up better). Then you simply pat the sponge over all of the holes, keeping it fully loaded with dust at all times.
When you remove the drawing from the painting surface, you should have a faint line of dots left behind, outlining your drawing.
Resist any temptation to wipe or blow away excess dust at this stage!
*To make your sponge more efficient, lie a closely woven cloth on a clean surface, place the sponge on top of the cloth, gather all the sides and edges of the cloth together above the sponge and bind a piece of string around the ‘neck’ of the cloth, forming a tight-ish sack. Use the smooth side of this sponge-filled sack to pounce your chalk dust.
(ii) Squaring up - (traditional)
This technique is particularly suited to transferring drawings of a different size to the intended painting.
One thing to take care of is that the proportions of your painting surface are identical to the proportions of your drawing, otherwise you will distort your drawing making it appear either elongated or squat.
For example, if you draw a rectangle around your drawing and that 'box' measures five units wide by eight units high, you have a ratio of 5:8. You must ensure that whatever the size of your intended painting, that the width to height ratio of your painting surface is also 5:8.
Do not be tempted to simply draw lines at convenient, equally measured distances from each other because if the painting surface is of a different size, then the calculation of the appropriate distances on your painting surface will become tedious in the extreme. Far better to make sure that the width to height ratios are the same and use the following procedure:
Draw a frame around your cartoon drawing which corresponds with the intended edges of your painting surface (allow a few extra millimetres for the area that will be covered by the picture frame, that way, your composition won't be compromised by framing).
Find the mid-point along the bottom edge of your pencil frame and mark the spot. Now do the same with the opposite top edge and join the two dots together with a pencil line and a long straight edge.
Then find the mid-point (along the bottom of your frame) between the point you have already marked and one corner of your drawing. Mark the spot and repeat on the opposite top edge, join the dots with a line.
Repeat this process for the other corner of your drawing.
Continue sub-dividing your picture in this way until you have a series of vertical parallel lines running across your drawing.
Use your judgement to decide how many sub-divisions you need, depending usually on the size of the painting and the complexity of the drawing.
When you have enough, repeat the process from one side of your drawing to the other until you have a series of horizontal parallel lines.
Then turn your attention to your painting surface. You can, if you wish, mark the surface with pencil lines in exactly the same way as above, but I find that pencil lines can be notoriously difficult to remove thoroughly and have a habit of remaining visible through some of the most transparent passages of your painting. If you must use a pencil, I find that HB or harder leads can be removed more effectively than softer leads.
The better alternative is to find the mid-points (as above) and push a drawing pin into the edge of your painting surface at those points.
Next, take a thin thread, tie it firmly to one of the pins in the corner and stretch it across your painting surface, joining opposite pins with a straight line of thread.
Wrap the thread around the opposing pin a couple of times and lead the thread to the neighbouring pin. Wrap again and stretch back across the surface once more to the opposing pin.
Repeat this weaving back and forward until you have created a 'grid' with the thread that resembles the grid you have drawn over your cartoon.
Now all you have to do is copy the outline of your drawing onto your painting surface (using either pencil or preferrably charcoal) by noting, box by box, where those outlines intersect your grid.
Look for easy places to start. For example, you can usually find places where the outlines of your drawing intersect one side of a grid box at exactly the half-way point. If you are even luckier, there will be places where the outlines intersect the 'cross-hairs' where four boxes meet.
Usually I would advise an artist to trust their eyes, not their brain but in this case, I would advise you to trust your brain. If, for example, one of the outlines of your drawing intersects the edge of a box at one third of the way across but somehow it is now closer to one quarter of the way across on your painting surface, then it doesn't matter if it looks right, it isn't, so you must correct it.
Again, if you are using charcoal to transfer the drawing, do not be tempted to rub or blow it away at this stage.
After you have transferred your two-hundredth drawing using one of the above traditional methods, you will be longing for a quicker, easier method. The following two 'duplicator' methods work extremely well for full-sized drawings.
(iii) One-off Duplicator
Cover the reverse side of your drawing with a smooth, even coat of either coloured chalk or pastel (don't use pastel crayons with either an oil content or too high a wax content).
Place your drawing onto the painting surface with the drawing uppermost.
Re-trace the outline of your drawing (I suggest using a coloured pencil so that you know which bits you’ve done and which you haven’t).
When you lift off your drawing, you should have a perfect outline left behind on the painting surface.
(iv) Multiple Duplicator
Similar to the above, except that you coat a separate piece of paper, rather than the back of your drawing, (this only works well with pastel crayon). The advantages of this technique are that (a) you will waste much less of your expensive pastel because it is the initial coating that uses the largest quantity of pastel, not the occasional ‘top-up’ and (b) it will keep your drawings nice and clean.
Use a piece of paper from a roll, larger than the largest size painting format that you usually use.
Place your tracing paper on your painting surface (pastel side down). Then place your drawing over the top, taking care to make sure that the edges line up with the edges of the painting surface.
Then re-trace the outline of your drawing using a coloured pencil.
You can prevent the pastel from drying out too much by wrapping it around a cardboard tube covered in polythene when you have finished and then wrapping and sealing another piece of polythene around the outside. Thus sealed, your duplicator sheet can be used again and again (albeit with occasional top-ups with pastel).
(v) The Hi-tech technique
I frequently find that I have used up all of my wall space for hanging paintings which are drying between stages and therefore don’t have the space to hang paper for full sized drawings. My modern (if expensive) solution for scaling up and transferring the drawing is as follows:
Do as large a drawing as you have space for
Photograph the drawing with a digital camera on the ‘documents’ setting (highly detailed - small aperture, sharp focus).
Print the photo onto paper at a maximum size of 15cm in any direction (the maximum size that my projector can handle).
Wait until it’s dark, then project the printout onto the canvas and re-trace the outlines with pencil or charcoal (projector must be of the professional type with a non-distorting lens).
It’s clean and quick and I still have a useful sized drawing to help me with placing the shadows.
NOTE: If you draw your figures small, any mistakes (in human proportions, etc) are amplified when you scale them up. This is why nearly all comments on the subject recommend learning to draw 'full-sized'. BUT I have found that you can sometimes take advantage of this fact if you want to give your figure paintings a genuine 'renaissance' feel. By drawing the figures very small and scaling them up, these imperfections sometimes add to what I can only describe as the 'hand-made' feel of certain types of painting.
FIXING YOUR DRAWING
After the last stage, you are left with either a light chalk outline, a charcoal outline or even a pencil outline of your drawing on your painting surface.
These outlines are often easily erased (usually accidentally) or contain excessive charcoal, so you need to 'fix' the drawing in a more permanent way before you can proceed.
(i) Fix using ink (traditional)
This is possibly one of the oldest methods of fixing your drawing. I have found manuscripts describing recipes for making ink used in this stage of the painting process dating back almost eight hundred years but it is certainly older than that.
Fortunately, you don't have to make your own ink anymore but it is still satisfying to apply it with a quill or even a modern dipping pen with detachable nib.
Use ink of the waterproof, permanent kind and trace over all of the outlines of the drawing that has been transferred to your painting surface.
When completely dry, tap the back of your painting surface to shake off loose chalk or charcoal.
(ii) Fix using paint (traditional)
If you have transferred your drawing using charcoal, then tap the back of the canvas (or other painting surface) to shake off excess dust before you fix with paint.
The procedure is as simple as it sounds, you simply take a small, round, hogs hair brush, thin down your paint with your 50/50 medium until it's only slightly thicker than ink, and re-trace your outlines.
I don't want to be too prescriptive about which colour to use for this paint fix as artists over the centuries have used many variations to good effect. Most commonly, the colours used have been English red, bistre, yellow ochre, verdigris, burnt umber, burnt sienna and raw umber.
(iii) Don't Fix.
There are many examples of painters, particularly in the late 18th and 19th centuries, who did not appear to fix their drawings at all. They were simply careful not to erase their charcoal outlines as they proceeded with the stages in their painting plan.
(iv) Using Fixatives
Some people have suggested using modern spray fixatives to 'fix' a charcoal drawing but I am not qualified to say how this chemical product would affect the oil in a painting and I have been unable to find a chemist that could enlighten me, so I can't really comment. It seems pretty pointless to me when there are tried and tested methods which really take up very little time.
If you look closely at old paintings, you will often be able to identify the 'fixed' outlines of objects, particularly figures. With some painters - particularly those of the Venetian school - you don't have to look that closely at all as they seem to have made a feature of their fixed outlines. I have found that as well as providing guidance, these outlines also add an almost imperceptible but nonetheless important contrast which adds to either to the realism of an object or the pictorial quality or both.
Experiment with brightly coloured paint fixes (pure English red or yellow ochre) next to skin tones and compare them with darker fixes and you will see what I mean.
