Scaling up the traditional way

The traditional ‘squaring up’ process is the method that I was taught at college, and has stood me in good stead ever since - I actually enjoy this preliminary process before moving on to painting. Start by drawing out a grid of equal-sized squares on your sketch or painting (or use a transparent overlay). 

Your larger support must be of the same proportion when scaled up, ie, a 10 x 12in canvas will scale up proportionally to 20 x 24in, then square this up in the same way and transfer your work over. Use a thin charcoal stick, pastel is also fine, but I often like to draw in the image using a loaded brush of raw umber using a No 2 Jackson’s Black Hog Round. Don’t use graphite pencil or marker pens, they can bleed through the surface of the painting in time, particularly if you’re painting with thin layers.

In my example, this small plein air oil sketch of Lichfield Cathedral (see above) was 25x30cm. I’ve transferred this image onto a larger 40x48cm linen board (see left) using charcoal on this occasion. I’d coated this board earlier with a yellow ochre and white ground of acrylic so it was bone dry to start working on. One thing that you must avoid is dragging up wet paint from your support ground.

Projectors: An alternative approach to this method is to use a projector, but unless you buy a really expensive machine you can forget it! The cheap one’s are a complete waste of money. The method I’ve shown is the best way to go and is used by the top professional artists including Ken Howard.

I can now start to block in some of the strongest tonal areas, keeping everything loose and painterly which will always be my preferred style of painting - I’m definitely not looking to achieve anything verging on photographic or indeed an architectural representation.

It’s so much easier to manage a complex painting once you have the main structure drawn out accurately. It’s just a matter of blocking it all in, but this needs to be done in the right sequence. However, a word of caution here - don’t spend too much time drawing in lots of detail at this stage, and don’t rely too heavily on these lines. Use them as a guide only, otherwise you could be in danger of carefully following them like a tight and flat ‘paint by numbers’ work, and also remember that most of these lines will be covered over eventually, 

Some of my working lines, including the grid lines may still be visible in the final painting, that’s quite acceptable and I have no issues with that, although I envisage that some may find that unusual.

Once my darkest tonal areas had been blocked in, I mixed a range of warm pastel colours for the cathedral and also for some of the buildings. I will be keeping detail to the bare minimum so the windows of the houses were simply indicated with a darker shade of the local colour, using a No 3 Black Hog Flat brush. So far it was all going to plan, I was managing to keep that loose and painterly style that I had originally set out to achieve.

Now to start blocking in the main structure of the cathedral, using the various shades of colour that I already had on my palette. I indicated the main arched shapes of the windows, and mixed a bluish grey for the shadow side of the spires and roofs. It was important to keep the sky simple and uncluttered, so this was blocked in using a cool mix of blue/grey tones with a base of unbleached titanium white.

Finally, a quick indication using a mix of phthalo green and ultramarine was used to scrub in the foreground trees and bushes with a worn Jackson’s Shiro Hog Round. I felt that this was adequate as I didn’t want to start adding large blocks of green, which may well have distracted the eye from the main composition and focal point.