From Digital to Paint

I’ve put a lot of work into my digital art process, but I’ve been determined to start painting with good old fashioned paint and canvas. I decided not to dive in headfirst, did some research, and found a pretty cool method to get started with this new style experiment. Since I’ve already put work into composition and line art for my digital work, I decided that my end goal would be to make gigantic versions of these on huge canvases.

I’d hang a giant canvas on the wall, project the artwork from my computer onto the canvas, and copy the general image shapes to ensure I keep the proper proportions while drawing at such a large scale. Before I spend the money on a bunch of huge canvases and rearranging my house to accommodate all these new materials, I figured I should just start out with 16x20 canvases and take it from there.

I bought the following materials from Amazon:

I bought this cheap, $50 Projector with pretty low expectations. I knew that I wasn’t going to get HD quality projections, but that it would help me to scale my artwork up to larger sizes. This does the trick, but the quality is really, really low. The image is very pixelated, but I was able to see the image clearly enough to make sure my outlines would be exactly the same as they were in the original.

I knew that I wanted them to share the same black, smooth background as my digital art, so I bought Black Canvases and Black Spray Paint. Without at least one coat of the black spray paint, the canvas would absorb all of my dots and I’d have to do more than 4-5 coats. To create my dot patterns, I thought of nail technicians and the Dotting Tools that they use to paint tiny little dot patterns. Last came the color, and I found a set of inexpensive, Neon Paints to experiment with.

Painting has been really, really relaxing and it’s very satisfying to finish large sections. One challenge has been that I now have to stop working to allow paint to dry, which feels like such a limitation. after being able to spend hours on something right away.

Click below for an up close view: