April 30, 1999, Author: WetCanvas! Editors

Now that you've printed your original image across multiple pages, it's time to put them all together and do the actual transfer to the canvas!

Use a pair of scissors to trim the excess borders from each page, being careful to leave the final "outside" border intact. Using some scotch tape piece the pages together, placing the strips of tape on top of the printed pages, not underneath!

Once you have the papers taped together, take a piece of charcoal or a charcoal pencil and cover the entire back of all the papers (as seen in the image to the left). if you have the squarish, stick-style charcoal, this shouldn't take more than a few seconds. Just lay the charcoal stick on its side and wipe back and forth. Be careful not to pull your pages apart when applying the charcoal! :-) If you don't have any charcoal, a standard pencil will suffice, although the resulting sketch will be a bit lighter.

Blow off any excess charcoal dust and place your taped pages on the canvas (charcoal side down). Use some tape to secure it to the edges of the canvas. Place the canvas on a flat surface, such as your dining room table. Now, using a ball point pen, trace or sketch as much of the original drawing as you desire. You can trace just the major guide lines and objects, or you can trace in all the detail as well - up to you.

When you are satisfied, carefully remove your printout from the canvas. Whatever you traced will be on the canvas! In the image to the left, you can see some of the detail of the Manet drawing on a fresh canvas. Blow off any excess charcoal dust from your canvas. You don't want to muddy things up when you start applying paint. If you prefer, spray some fixative to the canvas to preserve the original drawing.

From here, you are on your own. To the left, you will see the beginnings of a quick color wash and some opaque paint in certain spots. This is a far cry from the crude painting seen in the first step of this tutorial! The hard part is over! Your composition is intact, to scale, and ready for paint!   We hope you've enjoyed this handy tutorial. Feel free to forward all questions, comments, and suggestions to the editors!