Light in the darkness

One of the things I had to reverse for Sky Pads 27 was my drawing. Since the background was so dark, I would never be able to see a projection of black drawing lines on it. So I flipped the white/black areas in Photoshop so the drawing lines would be white.

I always project drawings onto the canvas if the canvas is bigger than, say, 16″ x 20″. My rationale is, I’ve already drawn the subject once in a small, manageable size. So there’s no need to draw it from scratch again when I can just draw it on the canvas from a projection of my original drawing. No matter what, I can’t trace a photograph because unless I make an original drawing of it I miss a lot of detail. Drawing it helps me come to “know” the subject matter so when I start to paint there’s no confusion about any particular details.

Here’s the original drawing and the inverse version. I think the inverse is pretty interesting all on its own. My in-house art critic tried to convince me to leave the white lines as-is and stop now. I told him no way, even if he is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of  Chicago. He replied as he usually does, “You handle paint really well”. Thank goodness for that!

Original drawing

Reverse of black-on-white original drawing

 

Here’s the painting progress so far. You can see the drawing lines on the left side where I’ll continue to let leaves make various degrees of appearance and definition.

Some leaves are braver than others