Today, toned the large canvas for 'The Earthly Concerns Of A Telepathic Daisy' with a fine wash of acrylic colour, my imprimatura. Then transferred over the basic drawing.
For this plastic canvas, and other surfaces which resist tracing like acrylic plastic or metal panels, I use oil paint and Polydraw polyester drafting film. For the first stage of any tracing I'd normally use a 0.5mm Uni Pin pen, but for this I used a normal automatic pencil because I wanted to be able to erase the lines. Then, flip the sheet and paint over the lines with a mix of raw umber and titanium white without any zinc. The paint is scrubbed very thinly, as thinly as can be painted. Then the sheet is flipped again and taped to the canvas, and a fine-tipped embossing scribe (like a sharp point with a tiny pin-head-ball tip) is used to trace over the lines. The result is a perfect transfer of the drawing in oil. I have used this technique in a painting itself, as it's a great way to 'paint' ultra-thin lines. It's more difficult when the target surface is full of wet paint, of course.
The drawing above is 80x80cm. Of course, once transferred the drawing will take a few days to dry, so I can't paint immediately (unless I want to include those outlines; I could theoretically trace over different colours for different parts of the painting, or even shade parts).
After the transfer is done, I wipe the paint off the Polydraw and erase the pencil lines, as this material is expensive and tough enough to be reused. The lines remain visible, embossed. The sheet is very slightly distorted, and it's also impossible to wipe the paint perfectly away, so this used sheet is not perfect, but this beautiful material can at least be reused once or twice.
