Lessons

Lesson Info

Window Tracings: Creating New Worlds

So, I'd like to show you a way to use tracing, a way to use tracing on a window to gather maybe a more industrial image, maybe an image that has some perspective to it. I was always a little intimidated by perspective drawing in school. I think I'm a little bit more comfortable working with organic shapes, things that can be a little bit more nebulous. So when it comes to hard perspective drawings of buildings and things like that, I was always searching for ways to kinda get around it a little bit, even though I can do it. So, if that's your case or if you're just sort of interested in like, what are the possibilities of using tracing, I wanna show you that. What we'll be using in this lesson, we'll be using transparent acetate or plastic. We'll be using a bit of tracing paper. And then, we'll be using some transfer paper with the pigment side down to transfer our tracing onto larger paper and experiment with making kind of new imaginary worlds out of the tracings that we collect. So ...

I wanna show you some possibilities for that, and I think you'll have fun configuring things in different ways and maybe using all this visual data to make your own scene out of maybe something that you see every day out of your window, but you can make it something new. So, I was just at the window in my studio here, and I put my acetate on the window and used an indelible Sharpie to just trace around the building across the street. And I do that quite a lot to gather information, new buildings, new places, new windows. I really enjoy making that kind of tracing and just gathering images. I have a bunch of them. I have a few that I've done in different places. Some have industrial elements, more industrial elements. Some have even some botanical elements. Anyway, I have a lot of raw material here and I wanna show you what I find to be the possibility of collecting this information and how you might move it to something somewhat abstract and then maybe moving into something like really quite abstract. So, first I wanna show you how I've played around a little bit with these two tracings. And what I've done is basically, if you can see this image here, I've taken these tracings and I've transferred them with my transfer paper. But you can see that this one lines up there, this one lines up there, and I'm gonna show you the transfer process. But then I also took this one ultimately and flipped it and transferred it here. And what that allowed me to do is to make a whole new kind of composition by transferring the images down. So this one repeats, but because it's on the acetate, I can flip it into the mirror image. That, I find to be really kinda fun. Maybe down the line, I'd take this one and maybe I'd flip it into a mirror image and try to play with lining it up somewhere else. So, there's a lot of variety that can come from working on acetate. There's a lotta variety that can come from almost actually repeating the same image as a mirror in one particular drawing. So, that's something that you might like to try. I'm gonna show you the transfer process in the next image that we look at together. And I personally, with this red transfer paper, I like the red line. You can get transfer paper in blue. You can use carbon paper with black. There's a lotta possibilities for that. You could over this line if you wanted to make it look a little bit more hand done, like a pencil drawing. But personally, I like the red lines. So, you can decide your preferences around that. So I wanna show you just a little bit more about the potential process for this. So, this image here, I took this image, and the first thing I did is I took a piece of tracing paper and I'm actually going to put a little white paper under it so you can see it a little better. I took my acetate tracing here and I put a piece of trace paper over it. And I just traced it one more time. Just traced it one more time because I knew that I wanted to transfer it down on a new sheet of paper. It's hard to transfer through acetate. So I just found a piece of translucent tracing paper, put it on top of the acetate, and made this tracing on this very lightweight paper. All right, so I have that. So I don't really need the acetate anymore. I can put it to the side. I've got my tracing. And under the tracing, so I moved the tracing around. I have another one down here that's already established, like I had in the last image off to the side. I thought to myself, like, "What would happen if rather than sort of piecing them side by side, I actually did a transfer one right on top of the other?" Like, one building on top of the other, one hedge on top of the other. And I sort of figured and we'll see what happens, I sort of figured that by doing that, I'd get a lot more of the possibility in terms of abstract passages. So, I'm gonna take this ballpoint pen, which has a very hard tip. I'm gonna double check that my transfer paper has the brighter side facing down, because that's where the pigment is. And then I'm gonna go ahead and just trace over sort of a section of this drawing. And again, the reason that I'm not just tracing over the acetate is 'cause the acetate actually is fairly thick, that very clear surface that we worked on by the window. The acetate is very thick, and I find it a little bit difficult to make a transfer through it, which is why I just took that one extra step and just traced it onto this lightweight tracing paper. And I'm going through this. I'm using a blue pen because sometimes you forget, "Oh, where did I trace, where did I transfer, where didn't I?" And so with a blue pen, I can kind of see where I left off. So, I'm going ahead and tracing this through. And I know that that's gonna create some interference. It's gonna create some sense of like probably a spatial confusion. It will be a layered, maybe actually somewhat chaotic kind of situation, but I'm up for it. I'm ready to see. And what I find so fun about this is, it's a little mindless. (laughing) Just like I'm going over the lines with pen and I don't know what it's gonna turn out to look like. But I think that there's sort of a wow moment, like an aha moment when you finally pick it up and you see the result, you see what ultimately it looks like combined with another drawing. So I'm gonna just do a little bit more here with this. I'm actually interested in getting this big pole in here. This big foreground element I think is kind of interesting. And then we have a few sort of more organic elements in the foreground that maybe I'll lay in. And I'm putting a good amount of pressure on the trace paper with the ballpoint pen because I wanna make sure that these red lines transfer. I wanna make sure that I'm getting a good amount of impact to the second image I'm laying down. All right, and you always wanna double check when you're working, even like before I've gotten this far, that you actually have the correct side facing down for your transfer paper. Okay. So I've done some tracing. I'm gonna flip it up now. Ooh. So, (laughing) so that did get rather abstract and I'm gonna take this off. So what just happened was, a section of this drawing just got transferred on top of the old drawing. And the combination of the two starts to create new shapes that I would not have predicted. It's sort of a, it's almost like layers of your experience, layers of what you saw, being superimposed on each other. This is interesting. I do it a lot. I work in this way a lot, just because it provides me an opportunity to have like new potential combinations of things. And what I like to do sometimes as well, because I feel like this almost has like a stained glass window kind of effect, is I can take some of my colored pencils and just, it could be kind of arbitrary, like to choose particular colors that you might wanna start to work into. And choose shapes that you like and just start to come in and add color to some of these shapes. It doesn't have to be the color that is actually there. It could just be finding little moments. Like I love this bright green. I'm gonna repeat it a few times across some of these new abstract shapes that were formed. Let's see, kind of here would be a neat. So sometimes when you take a particular color, it's hard to know, oh, well, where would I put that? I sometimes will repeat it several times across the composition to create a sense of balance, to create a sense of relationship. So there's some of my greens that I might put down, and the green, I feel now is like crying out for something warm in color, like I've been really into fluorescents lately. I'm not really sure why, but like maybe a fluorescent orange could come in and occupy some of these more industrial shapes next to the green so that the green and orange start to sort of zing next to each other. Like these little windows that now happen to have like a bush above them can interact in that way. Maybe some of these other random shapes now that are appearing could also have a fluorescent color. And with these two fluorescent colors in there or this fluorescent color and this bright green, now I'm sort of feeling like maybe I want something with a darker value, like something that might kind of offset them. So, I might bring in sort of a gray-blue and start adding in this dark shape coming up to the green. And you can see that this starts to really transform. What previously might've felt like a fairly readable industrial landscape image starts to become something that has a bit of like a jumble of shapes, that has a bit of chaos to it, that feels like an industrial landscape, but that actually transcends it. Because you've layered it, you've abstracted it, you made it your own. So I think that this way of working can be very liberating. It can be very playful. You can work with transferring images side by side, with mirroring them. You can work with overlaying them, adding color. So, the transfer paper is a really awesome tool to make repeated images and not to have to redraw things again and again. And it really helps you repeat things too, which can be really helpful. So this process of tracing at the window with a Sharpie pen on top of clear acetate, a way to sorta let go of any kind of apprehensions you might have about trying to draw a building, keeping it steady, tracing over the shapes, and then making a bunch of them and choosing the ones that you feel are good candidates for this transfer process. Transferring them, playing with them, adding color, and just see where it ends up. It's a really liberating way to use tracing and transfer to create new worlds.