Thursday, November 29, 2012

Digital Tracing Paper

My dad taught me the usefulness of tracing paper in composition at an early age. Draw each of your elements on a pieces of paper and move them around until a pleasing composition happens. Painter X can do this stage perfectly and with greater freedom. The above image has the girl on one layer, the hawk on another, and the rough sketch of a castle on the bottom layer. I could have left them all as rough sketches but I was tempted to render them and combine the layout stage and the charcoal value stage. I think it works well. All I have to do now is print it out and pin it beside my easel. I can even print multiples of this so I can work up a few color studies by painting right on top of it (mount the paper to foam-core and hit it with a layer of workable fixatif first, tho). If you look at the hawks legs, you can see they are all wrong. Changing those would be frustrating with tissue paper but I can now select the legs and rotate/distort them into a correct position... something tracing paper just can't do!

Another benefit of using Painter X at the layout stage is the Divine Proportion and Layout Grid tools. (menu: Window>Show Divine Proportion and Show Layout Grid.)

I situate the divine proportion on my canvas and it helps me imagine a layout (click to enlarge image below):
Sketch using the Divine Proportion overlay tool in Painter X

I also use the Layout Grid to help divide my canvas into thirds (rule of thirds):
Sketch divided into thirds.
All of this is incredibly freeing. I hope everyone who can will try this out. (Note that the divine proportion grid and the rule of thirds grid can be done without the computer's help)