Artist have various methods of transferring an image to their paper or canvas. They can use a computer and projector, overhead projector or a projector specifically designed to project an image for them.


Today artist also use "Layers" when creating an image using Photoshop or Painter. It allows artists to trace an image using a drawing tablet and a photograph or drawing that is placed on a layer in the program. This is the method I have used for the images assembled in this website, created using both Photoshop and Painter.

Using a device to trace an image onto paper or canvas is not a new concept. Centuries ago artists used the Camera obscura to trace an image onto paper. The first reference to such a device was made by Aristotle, 330 BC.

Camera obscura (||Cam"e*ra ob*scu"ra) [LL. camera chamber + L. obscurus, obscura, dark.] (Opt.)
An apparatus in which the images of external objects, formed by a convex lens or a concave mirror, are thrown on a paper or other white surface placed in the focus of the lens or mirror within a darkened chamber, or box, so that the outlines may be traced.

The first casual reference [to the Camera Obscura] is by Aristotle (Problems, ca 330 BC), who questions how the sun can make a circular image when it shines through a square hole.

more: http://www.acmi.net.au/aic/CAMERA_OBSCURA.html

Johannes Vermeer
For more than a hundred years, it has been suggested that the great 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer made use of the camera obscura as an aid to painting. The camera obscura was the predecessor of the photographic camera, but without the light-sensitive film or plate. It is well established that in the 18th century some other famous painters employed the device, the best-known being Canaletto, whose own camera obscura survives in the Correr Museum in Venice. The English portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds owned a camera; and the device was widely used by landscape artists, both professional and amateur, up until the invention of chemical photography in the 1830s. With Vermeer the question of whether he used optical methods is more controversial.

more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/vermeer_camera_01.shtml