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When the composition is all laid out in this way, I make registration marks on each sheet of tracing paper as
I remove it from the canvas. I have already made registration marks on the canvas itself. When I am ready
to re-tape each piece of tissue to the canvas for transferring, these registration marks help me to position it
correctly. Then I blacken the back of each sheet of tissue with artist’s charcoal and securely tape it back in
its place on the canvas. I then retrace the drawing on the front of the tissue, and the charcoal on the back
acts like a carbon paper and the drawing is transferred to the canvas surface. By the time I am through
retracing the drawing on each piece of tracing tissue, I have a canvas with an outline drawing of the entire
scene that looks like a paint-by-number without the numbers.
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Now, I can almost hear some of you thinking…”That sounds like cheating to me. If Brad is such a great artist,
then why does he have to trace?” Well, I don’t have to trace. I do it to save time. Quite honestly, tracing is easier
than measuring out all those proportions by eye and laboriously copying each photo to the canvas, hoping that I’ll
get the composition right and that I won’t accidentally run anything off the edge of the canvas, instead of making it
fit in the available space. Besides, my line drawing is quite simple and devoid of form and detail. All of that form
and detail which you see in the finished work obviously has to be painted, and painting is drawing, only it’s done
with a brush. So, it’s not always cheating to trace. Of course, an artist should not become overly dependent on
tracing, either. Tracing is a tool, not a crutch. As I always used to tell my students, “If you can draw well, tracing
won’t hurt; and if you can’t draw well, tracing won’t help.”
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This approach of artists tracing a line drawing onto canvas is nothing new. Back in the 16th century they had a
projection device called the camera obscura that was actually a pinhole camera as big as a small room. The artist
sat in the box-like device, which was totally light proofed except for a tiny hole, which acted as a lens, in one side.
The artist would tack his canvas to the inside wall of the box, opposite the lens-hole, and the scene in front of the
camera obscura was automatically projected onto the wall inside the device where the artist traced the outlines
of the scene onto his canvas. I believe Jan Vermeer, the 16th century Flemish painter, composed one or more
of his paintings in this way, as did many other painters in the years before photography.
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