Crucifix Process 4

Please forgive another quick photo dump! These photos were taken on Oct 9th and 10th. I redrew the sketch to be more anatomically descriptive, so I needed to make another full-scale cartoon in order to transfer it. Using my ink jet printer, I printed a tiled version of the sketch from Adobe Acrobat, then trimmed and assembled the pages with tape. This is much faster and more accurate than using a grid or a projector, and it costs only pennies.

You can see from the sketch that instead of shading it smoothly, I've outlined geometric shapes that approximate the light and dark areas. The curved contours have also been converted to more angular shapes. This will make it easier to transfer, and will help with the shading in oil paints.

After the drawing is assembled, I laid sheets of tissue paper over it and traced the drawing onto the tissue paper. (You can find large rolls of tracing paper, which works better, but I don't live near any art supply stores, so tissue paper works almost just as well.) Regular paper is too thick to allow pen strokes to transfer through to the graphite paper, so you need to use tracing paper or something very thin.

The cartoon is trimmed for accurate positioning.

I printed the inscription directly onto tracing paper, to
save a step. You can see the graphite paper underneath.

The drawing is completed after I outline the edges of the
gold leaf, which extends into the cross an extra .75 in.