April 30, 1999, Author: WetCanvas! Editors

One of the most difficult hurdles faced by new painters face is composition. "I can't draw to save my life!". Well, now you don't need to "draw" to "paint". Just follow this easy technique to avoid wrestling with the composition for hours. The idea is to have fun, right? :-)

Do you recognize the drawing to the left? Probably not, unless you are a die-hard Impressionist fan. This is an 1869 pen/ink drawing done by Edouard Manet entitled au Cafe. Historians generally agree on the subject depicted within the drawing. This is the legendary Café Guerbois, where the founders of impressionism passed the time over bread and a glass of absinthe. So you'd like to give this painting a shot, but you say you can't draw? Are you afraid to work on bigger canvases? Well, today, friends, we will let your personal computer assist in the composition! What's that?! My PC?! Yep.

If your compositional skills leave a lot to be desired, an attempt to do this painting by hand might result in something like this. Is there a shortcut to composition? Read on...

There are all sorts of ways of getting a drawing or a sketch onto a canvas. You can do it by hand, of course. You can also use an opaque projector or some other sort of drawing aid. However, if you are like most artists, and are out to save a few dollars, you can use your PC instead of purchasing a projector. There are many ways to do this, of course. The easiest way is to fire up your favorite imaging program, load in a digital version of a famous painting, and print it out. You can then use transfer paper or an opaque projector to do the actual transfer. Of course, this technique only works if your canvas is no bigger than a standard sheet of printer paper! Is there a way to transfer an image to a larger canvas? Yes there is! If we've grabbed your interest, it's time to download a nifty shareware program called Poster. The latest version, as of this writing, is v6.1. You can download this excellent utility by surfing on over to http://www.postersw.com. What will Poster do for me? Well, all sorts of things. If you are creating posters or banners, it's an indispensable tool. However, in this lesson, we are only concerned with one very specific function of this package. It has the ability to print a single image across multiple sheets of paper. Hoo yah! If you've downloaded the poster software, you are ready to move on to the next step!