An Acrylic Painting of a Nude Male Figure.

I had the best of intentions of sitting down Saturday and painting for an hour, but home renovations beat me to the point that painting wasn’t an option. I did get a chance to do a bit of preparation work though.

For my subject I selected a male nude figure from Deviant art (figmodel10’s stock image account) that I had saved on my computer last December.

Male nude stock 8 by figmodel10

For reference I printed out a greyscale copy of the original stock image with my laser printer. Then I decided to try something different. Instead of sketching directly onto the canvas board I drew a 1/2″ grid over the printout.

The idea behind this was to use the grid to copy the original to the larger canvas, keeping the proportions of the figure.

Transfer grid on original

My first big problem was figuring out what size of grid to evenly divide up my canvas as I had done with my printout. I only had an Imperial measuring tape and was ending up with grid sizes of 41/64th” and other foolishness. I finally ended up just eyeballing it after much trial and error – settling on a 6/8″ grid on my canvas. I marked the grid out using a 4h pencil and called it a night.

grid on canvas panel

Once I had my grid penciled onto my canvas I grabbed some charcoal. I started to draw a rough outline, copying each grid on my original to my canvas panel. I stopped and took the snapshot below when I was about half finished the sketch.

It was right about this time that I realized that I have never painted a figure before. This could get ugly.

Next week I’m going to try and paint an undercoat. We’ll see how it works out.

Charcoal sketch on canvas