How do you get from photo to canvas?

[Garth Herrick]

Another method if you don't wish to eat up printer ink is to trace off your computer monitor (Carefully! You don't want to damage that flat screen surface). Scale the image on the monitor to 100% of the scale of your painting. The way I do this is to scale the reference image file to the same dimensions as the painting in Photoshop/ Image/ Image Size: Set the Resolution to 96 Pixels/Inch, then set the width or height to match your painting size; press OK. Now when you set the image scale on the Navigator menu to 100%, it should be in the same scale as your painting.

NOTE: This may need tweaking to the particular monitor reolution you are using. I am using 1280 x 1024 pixels monitor resolution (17 inch Apple Studio Display flatscreen LCD), and this recipe should work for this size monitor and resolution setting.

Overlay a sheet of tracing paper, trace what you need. Remove the tracing and lay the drawn side face down and go over every line with a soft pastel. Then lay the sheet over the desired part of the painting, with the pastel side to the canvas, and trace the lines again to transfer the pastel. It looks like a snapped chalkline. If the positioning or registration is wrong, wipe it off and tranfer again.