How To Make A Tribute Painting : Step Two

We're going to skip over the step where you lather a thick coat of Gesso onto the canvas that you've chosen for your painting and just assume that you've taken care of that already. Once the white surface has been prepared, you're ready to go.

Grab a pencil and sketch in the outline of the painting. For this step, it's more important to make the lines visible than to worry about whether the lines will show through the paint itself. It will. Let me put it another way, there is nothing you can do to hide the pencil lines used in the sketch. They will continue to show through the paint, ruining the overall effect and shining like a beacon of amaturishness that will blind anyone in the same room with thing when you're done. You might as well just give up and accept it.
Now there are those who think they'll be able to make the lines dark enough to be visible on the white surface, but light enough to disappear when painted over. The drawback towards this theory is that it is more likely to bite you, the painter, in the tookas. The first coat of paint will totally obliterate the lines which defeats the purpose of having a sketch in the first place. Relax and let it happen. The lines will show through and you'll deal with them when the time comes.

Now, take a good look at that picture I posted up there. See it? That's the best the painting is going to look like for a long, long time. Just like a dinner at Applebees, it's got to get worse before it gets better. The next few steps will seem like little more than deliberate efforts to deface the above image. So enjoy the view while you can.

As you can (barely) tell, I've sketched the full poster onto the canvas, cropping out the fence that was in the original image. "But why would you do something like that?" I hear you ask. Yes, the fence was part of the immerse world which Syberia is known for, but the point of having a tribute painting is actually making something that only existed in digital form before and bringing it into the corporeal world. For this reason, you just want to get the poster, not the scenery. "Yeah, but at the same time the world around the poster is just as much a part of the digitally created experience that I'm trying to capture. While the poster appears in the world as a hermetic element, nevertheless it is joined to its surroundings by tone which merges harmoniously with the experience. Wouldn't that necessitate capturing the fence in the painting as well?" you ask. To which I tell you to put a sock in it.

The various elements in the poster don't match exactly to the dimensions of the canvas, but it's close enough for our purposes. Let's take one last look at what we've got so far, and then go on to step three.