Transferring a drawing, rain, and some photos

As I said yesterday, I need a whole lot more foreground and air around the tree that I started the painting of yesterday. Shoehorning the thing onto a 9 by 12 really threw me. So I am going to take another panel and give myself more room. Here's how.This will be real basic for some of you, but others out there have never seen this, and I want to show the simple technique for transferring a drawing.

First, I taped tracing paper from a roll, over the panel from yesterday. I then pulled a tracing from the painting below, just the major lines are enough.

I run my soft pencil around the edge of the panel to mark that, and then I tape the tracing paper into the middle of a larger panel. I use artists transfer paper,that's important. Unlike carbon paper (does anyone still use that stuff, now that no one types? ) transfer paper has no wax in it. Painting over anything containing wax can be a problem, particularly in water media. Here is the transfer paper, it comes in a number of different colors, but I only stock two kinds, black for working on white grounds, and yellow for transferring to dark grounds.

I slip a partial sheet of transfer paper between my tracing and the panel. I go over the lines again with my ebony pencil and then I have this.

Then I drove up to Laconia, about an hour north and set up again in front of my tree. This time I have plenty of room around the tree to add whatever amount of the surroundings I want. There is a pond with deep black water and lilly pads and colored leaves floating in it, and there are cattails across the foreground, I know I want those. I also want more air around that tree so I will paint out from it a ways, and then crop to what I want to keep. I do need the cropped image to be 3 by 4 in proportion though.

As soon as I set up and went to work it began to rain heavily, so I packed the whole kit up and left. On my way home I seemed to drive out of the rain, so I took the exit for Canterbury village, an old Shaker farm that has been preserved. I know it has stone walls and good trees. I am trying to build up my photo collection of these. Although I don't usually work from photos, autumn color is short and I intend to rearrange them a lot when I make the paintings. I want to make some tonalist earth colored studio pieces. Here are a couple of the pictures I took.

This one below, is looking along an old Shaker wall with one of their communal fields on the left. I guess this tree is old enough to have been there in those days.I like to take pictures in the last hour of light, even on a gray day I get the look I want. Lately when I have been out painting, I make a point upon packing up, of getting out my camera and walking around to take some pictures.

I was feeling so BLESSED to be in New England today. I don't often throw that word around, but I don't know any other way to describe how perfect the back roads of New Hampshire are in the autumn as the light fails.