Painting a boat - A minor mishap!

I've fallen at the first hurdle with my boat painting. As you can see in the image below, I've made a schoolboy error when transferring the image from photograph to canvas. The photograph is 7" x 5", but the canvas is 24" x 20". It doesn't take Carol Vorderman to tell you that those numbers don't add up. In the image below, I've overlaid the photograph onto the sketch I made on the canvas, and made it semi-transparent. You can see that the boat I have drawn is quite a bit taller than the boat in the photo, because the canvas is taller than the photo, and therefore the squares in the 4 x 4 grid I drew are also taller. Whoops!

So, what can I do about it? Well, I was going to whitewash the canvas and start again, but I just happened to notice that the canvas in question was also slightly warped (you can see the wrinkle in the top right hand corner), so it won't lie flat against a wall. I think if I'm giving this to someone as a gift, then they should at least be able to hang it up, so I'm going to start again on a new canvas and use that one for some of my own studies or caricatures. I ordered some canvases online yesterday at www.artifolk.co.uk. I'm not sure how much canvas goes for in this country (I've previously bought it very cheap from China - hence the poor quality!), but this site seemed quite competetive compared to the five or six sites I checked out. They currently offer Winsor & Newton canvases at half price, so I bought 3 20" x 24" and 4 12" x 12" as well as a 250ml bottle of Daler-Rowney white paint for about £41 (free delivery on orders over £40). Not super cheap, but I know it's a good brand so hopefully the quality will be good. If anyone knows a better site for online art supplies, I'd love to know about it.

And the solution to the size issue? I think I'll redraw the grid at about 24" x 17.5" and add a bit of extra sky at the top and sea at the bottom. Problem solved! Okay, I'll post an update when my new canvas arrives!


How NOT to transfer a drawing to the canvas

Tags: painting, proportion, acrylic, technique, art supplies, canvas