At the end of last week, I completed my first run of perfected prototypes of some items I’ve produced for sale, which was a big milestone! I’ve been celebrating by turning to the next project on the docket: some seasonal botanical illustrations with Fall and Winter themes. Really, I just want an excuse to spend a little time in the sunshine, painting with a brush and with real paint that gets under your fingernails.
I knew that after my week of printing and trimming and tweaking little settings in front of the computer, this week I was going to want to start by checking in with my roots. I couldn’t help putting together my sketches in Photoshop for the last two designs in my head. The first is the “Autumn Foliage” above, with a palette that’s heavy in red, with mustard, and olive. Since I want the look of actual painting for these, I needed to get the doodles I completed during the week onto some blank watercolor paper.
The answer ended up being really simple and low-tech: I mirrored the doodle and printed it at actual size. Then, using a regular old pencil and tracing paper, I traced the lines of my doodle with a pretty high amount of pressure to get lots of graphite on the page. By flipping the tracing paper onto a blank page and tracing over the lines again, I got a nice, faint line drawing that will be perfect for painting over.
I vaguely remember learning this basic technique from the back of a book I had in elementary school called How to Draw Monsters (of course). It was boring and felt time-consuming to go over the sketched lines twice, but in transferring the drawing this way, I got another chance to make the shapes in my doodle more specific. In actuality, it only felt time-consuming: if I would have spent the time to grid the page as I had done for the first two paintings, I wouldn’t even have the first sketch finished.
Since it’s still just graphite, I can still erase and rearrange anything I want before putting any gouache on it. I’ve never started digitally and worked backward onto paper, but this was really satisfying and efficient. I know that I’m going to use it for future work, too. On purpose. It’s been so long since I’ve broken out the tracing paper that realize I grew up somewhere and forgot that it was a tool in my arsenal. To be honest, I had almost forgotten that it was even in the drawer. This went so well that I don’t think it’s ever going to be that dusty again.