Using Photoshop to transfer a sketch to canvas

How I use Photoshop to transfer a sketch to canvas.

There are many ways of transferring a sketch to canvas for painting. I used to use a grid system, since my painting area is always larger than my pencil drawing. But since I have a computer and a printer, I am now using Photoshop to transfer a sketch to canvas. The following is how I do it.

For this example, I will refer to the painting I am currently working on, The Battle of Chaffin’s Farm. You can read more about this in a previous post here.

I begin with the sketch, which I usually do on a standard drawing pad, and then I scan the art. If the drawing is too big for the scanner, I scan one part, then scan another part. In this case, the main figure is one sketch. The foreground figures are another sketch. Usually I set the scan for 150 dpi, although it really doesn’t matter. As long as it can print out a rough of the drawing.

Using Photoshop

Now I move over to Photoshop. When I take the drawing or drawings into Photoshop, I like as much contrast as possible. I achieve this by going to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Then I cut and past the images into a new Photoshop document. In the new document, I try to match the proportions of the final artwork as close as I can. For a 30″ x 24″ canvas, I set the artboard size to 10″ x 8″. So now I should have the drawings in the new document, each on its own layer.

The great thing about using Photoshop, I can move elements around. In this case, I felt the 2 foreground figures were too close to the main figure. So I just moved them down a bit. Another thing is that I can add to the sketch if necessary. In this example, I did not like that the rifle of the central soldier extends off the artboard. It would work better if the rifle is at more of an angle. So I just redrew only the hand and the rifle, scanned that, and then imported into the Photoshop file, replacing the old rifle.

Printing out the enlarged sketch

Once everything looks good, I need to print out the sketch for transferring to the canvas. Since the canvas size is 3 times the artboard size, I print out at 300%. Since I only can print out on letter size paper, I will tile the sketch and then tape the papers together. As you can see in the images, I printed out 5 sections of the sketch. Once printed, I just used tape assemble the prints.

Now I lay a sheet of tracing paper over the enlarged printout of the sketch. Using the method described here, I use the tracing paper to transfer the drawing to the canvas.

If you don’t have access to scanner or printer, I have attached a link on other methods to transfer a drawing.
How to transfer an image onto canvas