Finding inspirations, using reference images.

While going on vacation is certainly a treat, sometimes it does derail your focus for your creativity. After all, creative brains never sleep, right?

I found myself trying to take photos of places and flowers on my trip to use as future reference images. I’m definitely an artist that needs the reference photo to work from.

Working as a Scenic Artist for theatre for over 20 years, I’ve had to learn to streamline my process to be able to paint and produce the work as fast as I could. Time is money, right? When I first started as a Scenic Artist, the most used method to transfer the image from reference to the surface (usually a large backdrop) was the grid method.

Painted for Million Dollar Quartet at the Citadel Theatre. Design by Cory Sincennes.

We would staple string at 1’ intervals and run it up and down and side to side of the material until we could create a grid that could then easily be removed. The backdrops tended to be about 24’x48’. So there was a lot of string, and a lot of work to set it up just to be able to start to work.

As technology advanced, so did our techniques. For the theatre, they started getting some pretty massive projectors, so I was able to utilize them to project the image that I wanted to paint. Then it was essentially me tracing the image. It sounds

easy, but depending on your setup and focus, it can be daunting. In the first image, you can see the Sun Records logo that was projected (kneeling pad for size reference is about 18” X 30”). From a distance, it looks like it’s easy to just copy the image.

When you got closer to actually work on it, the second image is truly what you saw. Essentially, the image was out of focus, which is what created the blue/red shift on the lettering. It wasn’t fun. It took me a whole day to get this done and I had to stare at the squares for the whole time. While the projectors are in a way a huge help, there is definitely a finesse to them that some may find very daunting. I think this gives me an idea to do up a little video on how I use a projector to transfer my images onto my paintings.

But I do use the same method, just really scaled down for my paintings. It ensures that my proportions are correct right off the bat. It allows me to get the image on the paper in an efficient manner so that I can get straight to the painting.

I use a wee, tiny projector mounted on my tripod so that I can project straight down onto the paper. If my paper is too large, I will mount it on my easel and project horizontally, always making sure that my skew is corrected and my image is truly square.

I am realizing that my explanation of this process seems a bit vague, and for that I apologize. I just also makes me realize that to fully explain this, I think I really need to do a video. But here we are. That will come.

There are a number of wee projectors, called Pico Projectors available on the market, sometimes you can also order small projectors now through places like Walmart that don’t break the bank. It surely seemed for a time that the only kind of projectors you could get were thousands of dollars, but it is available now to get a simple small one for just over a hundred CAD.

I’m hoping that this blog post gives artists permission in a way that they don’t have to feel like they have to work so hard to get the image on paper. Don’t get me wrong - drawing skills are important, but that’s part of the whole process. You get better with practicing. You get the practice by actually doing it. Getting the image on paper shouldn’t be the barrier to keep you from painting and finding success with your art. Some artists just use the reference images as a rough guide. It’s all acceptable and there’s no hard rules to it. That’s just my two bits.

Thanks for reading.

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