Great-Grandma's Chair, Step 2

The Drawing

I printed out the picture onto plain bond paper, painted in a suggestion of the stone fireplace background and the floor. Then I taped a piece of Saran wrap across it, and very carefully made a grid with 20 equal sections across the top and 28 down the side to correspond to my 20 x 28 inch canvas. I used a fine black permanent marker for the lines, and marked the columns accordingly. 

The gridded sketch

The 20 x 28 canvas is not a standard size, so I made one by stretching Belgium linen onto stretcher bars, adding two coats of rabbit skin glue, followed by three coats of acrylic gesso. (I'm making that sound a lot simpler than it is.) Then I toned the canvas with burnt sienna, and with soft charcoal, gridded the canvas. Now it corresponds with the gridded sketch above. 

The toned and gridded linen

Then square by square, I transferred the image from the gridded sketch to the gridded canvas, again using soft vine charcoal. Since the quilt is so complicated, you can see where I put some letters in to identify the quilt patches: P for pink, G for green, B for blue, and so on.  I was bound to get totally lost if I didn't do that.  

The charcoal drawing