Elevate your Paintings and Sketches by Mastering the Technique of Transferring Reference Photos

1. Introduction: Do you love to paint, but generally the idea of drawing reference photos, then this is the class for you. Hi, my name is Trisha. I remember a lot of times having the urge to paint, but the ideal drawing, the reference, turn me off, then my Hayden try and I found a few methods that works for me in this class. I will share with you how I transfer my reference photos on my sketchbook, watercolor, paper and Canvas. The first method is breaking down the reference photo into simple shapes. This method is useful in drawing simple references. Second, I will show you how to use the grid method. Lot of artists whereby this method, in this method we created read on the reference photo and then draw the picture piece by piece. The turn method would be tracing. I'm demonstrating this on watercolor paper, but you can use any people that is not very thick. If you have any reservations about tracing that it makes you any less of an artist, then here's the code for you. Lastly, I would show you how to transfer drawings onto a canvas. This method will require a tracing paper and a carbon or graphite paper. This method is very useful to transfer pictures onto canvases, as it is quite difficult to draw directly on a canvas, you can use these methods in a variety of combinations depending on your needs. These methods will come in handy at times when you feel the drawing is getting a bit boring and tedious. And when your main purpose is to learn shading painting or something else, Let's begin learning. 2. Breaking into Simple Shapes: In this lesson, I will share with you how I draw reference photos which can be broken down into simple shapes. The example I have here is of an apple to apple here can be broken down into a circle. Now I have pleased the circle on the app boon to daily virgin, the apple. Now this will be our guide to join. The apple. Will begin by drawing a circle. The size of the circle will depend on how big the app where you want to draw. Also made sure to draw it very lightly because we want to erase it later. With the circle as a guide, I'll draw around the circle to make the shape of the apple. This method is very useful when the reference picture can be broken down into simple shapes. The trick here is to keep looking at your reference photo. Now I'm adding the shadow of the output. Now I'm drawing the details and the apple. In this lesson, we learned how to draw reference pictures which can be broken down into simple shapes. 3. Grid Method: In this lesson will retreat suggestions photo by the grid method. I'm opening my reference photo in Canva and then I'm going to use green rulers in Canva to draw a grid on my photo. I'm going to pull down guidelines and create a grid on my reference photo. After doing a little bit of cancellation, I decided, and I will make a box, a big box, which is 15 centimeters in, 21 centimeter in height. Then I will divide it into a grid with three centimeter by two centimeter. This method is very useful when you want to scale any picture. You can take any small picture, got it out into a grid. So you can make a bigger grid and hence you can meet the bigger picture. Now I'm going to divide the box into five columns and seven rows, which will give us 35 boxes, which we need to draw. This method is a bit tedious because you need to draw the whole grid. Again. This method is also very helpful because it tells us the placement of things on the grid. Now drawing the reference becomes so much easier because what we need to do is just draw one box accurately and then the other books accurately. And eventually we will make the whole picture. As you can see down the soils in the ice cream. When it gets a bit complicated, I would just come down which walks I'm drawing. It just makes the process much, much, much easier. It all you need to do is just follow the shape in the boxes and in pretty give you a very detailed idea of where things are placed in the reference photo. And you can get pretty good results with this method. It's done. So in this lesson, we talked about how to draw reference photo with the help of a grid. 4. Tracing: In this lesson, we trace this portrait on a watercolor paper. The watercolor papers are quite take, but I've still use this method to transfer the references on my watercolor paper many times in this method I will indirectly please my watercolor paper onto the laptop screen. To this method is basically a DRY version of a light board. So basically a lightbox is a box with light in it and you place a reference photo on top of it and then your paper on top of that. And when you switch on the light, you can see the reference photo from beneath the surface, but I don't have a lightbox. I use my laptop screen instead. What I do is that I switch off all the lights in the room and I don't on the brightness of the screen off my laptop screen to the highest. And then I placed my paper on top of elaborate screen. And I just stress, this is the size of the image I want to transfer on my watercolor paper. As you can see, the picture is not fitting in this greens. I have to move my screen up and down a few times. I have to move my paper up and down when I have traced one part of it. If you want, you can tape your paper onto the screen so that it doesn't move. It does not have please my paper on the screen and I've adjusted the sizes of picture and now I will just trace whatever I can see. I'm not going to be super detailed with the tracing. I just want to know where the things are, where the features on him and the hair is, and when the hands-on, then we'll redraw on top of it. Now I have moles my screen and now I have to adjust my paper according to that. And then I will trace again. There are some details which you can't see while you are tracing. So I'm just moving back and forth, back and forth to see the difference for door and get all the details. Now I'm going to very lightly rub off the picture so that I can draw on top of it. So for this technique, you do need a little bit of drawing skills because you can't it completely draw the portrait off of tracing needs to be some detailed drawing. Also, when your main purpose is to learn painting, portrait painting, you don't want to spend a lot of time just drawing the portrait. You will this matter quite a lot to draw my portraits, I can spend more time painting than destroying. For me, this is the best method of transferring reference photos on your, on your watercolor paper. I have done it dozens of times and a journey works well for me. 5. Tracing and Transferring: In this lesson, I will show you how I trying to reference photos onto a canvas. There are two steps to this process. In the first step will transfer to photo onto tracing paper and then onto the canvas using a carbon paper. Seven, begin my marketing the shape of my canvas onto the tracing paper. Next I will cut out the tracing paper leaving a little bit Edge. Next I will place this tracing paper onto a laptop screen and I will increase the brightness. We also need to adjust the shape of the drawing to the shape of the canvas that we draw on the tracing paper. Now I'm going to tape the tracing paper onto the laptop screen so that it doesn't move. Now I will trace the shapes that I'm seeing. This took me a bit of time because I chose a very difficult reference picture here. But you can transmit any picture with this method. So here I'm using the carbon paper. You can also use the graphite paper. A DAY technique to make graphite paper is to take a sheet of paper and on the backside of it, just scribbled the whole page with your pencil and just make the whole paper dark and black. That would also work, has a carbon paper, graphite paper. Now I'm going to place the cameras on top of which I will place the carbon paper and on top of that every place my tracing paper. So as you can see, I've put a white paper underneath the tracing paper because it was not visible. Maybe you can't see the picture I've traced right now because it's really light. Just make property adjustments so that the paper is aligned with the Canvas. Keeping our reference photo with me here so that I can see what I'm drawing and I can correct if there's any mistakes, I can correct any mistakes I might have made while tracing the picture. Here is the Jon's foot picture. This is one of my favorite methods to Johns who are pictured on a canvas. I have used this many times then invokes very finely for me.