The toughest part of scaling and transferring pictures is getting the proportions right. Have you ever seen an artist hold up their thumb in the air and sight things? What they are doing is using their thumb to scale the object, then will use their thumb again to measure as they scale the vision down onto their canvas. Instead of a thumb, I draw a grid on the source picture, and then draw a grid on the destination. Then I use the intersections of the grids to figure where the lines should be drawn.
In my head I say "looks like that part starts 1/3 of the way from that intersection, and goes up to 1/2 above the intersection of that area". And I just continue each line through the new grid.
- jason4.jpg (24.47 KiB) Viewed 519 times
Here is a closer examination, lets say we were just drawing the back corner of the hat. Look where the original hat crosses the grid lines, and then draw the new hat in the new grid. Pretty simple huh? At first a drawing might look overwhelming because of the large amount of detail, but if you just take it one line at a time, you can complete very elaborate pieces of art and have them turn out pretty good without any fancy tools.
- jason5.jpg (15.57 KiB) Viewed 519 times
Here is an exmaple of a transfer I did, it was for a 14' long cardboard boat named "Ship Shape". I was able to get Hooters as a sponsor and came up with the idea of making a kayak shaped hull with a hooters waitress on it.
First I had to clip together several pictures off the internet to get the kind of pose I wanted.
- h1.jpg (44.07 KiB) Viewed 516 times
I drew a grid on it, then drew a grid on the top of my boat. The boat ended up being a bit longer proportion wise, so I stretched the grid vertically a little bit.
- h2.jpg (41.84 KiB) Viewed 516 times
After penciling in the big lines, I just filled it in with paint, simple as that.
- h3.jpg (44.34 KiB) Viewed 514 times
- h4.jpg (51.81 KiB) Viewed 514 times
