Murals
A wall is too large to grid and too visible to get wrong. Project the drawing at full size, trace the masses, then paint away from the projector in daylight.
Included with Pro
Project it straight onto the surface
Skip the grid and the transfer paper. Line the guide up with what you are actually painting, check the scale bar, then draw at full size.
Drag the four corners. The guide follows them, using the same calculation the studio uses.
Put the four corners on the four real corners
A projector almost never sits square to what it is pointed at, so the picture arrives as a skewed quadrilateral. Drag each corner marker onto the matching corner of your canvas and Pacyra works out the transform that undoes the skew. Everything after that is drawn through it, including the guide lines and the scale bar.
Check the scale bar before you draw anything
The bar is ten centimetres at true size. Hold a ruler against it. If it measures ten, every shape on the surface is the size it will be in the finished painting. If it does not, the projector has moved or its zoom has changed, and the corners want setting again.
Choose what is thrown
Outlines alone for tracing, or the masses with their colour behind them for reading value at a distance. Lines and numbers can each be switched off. Line weight and colour strength matter more here than they do on a screen, because a line that reads at arm's length can disappear at three metres.
Work at any size
Nothing about this is limited to a small canvas. It is at its best on the things that are hardest to transfer by hand.
Made for surfaces a grid cannot help with
Large canvases
Beyond about a metre, transferring by eye starts to drift and squaring up costs an afternoon. The projection is already at the size you are painting.
A wall at home
A feature wall, a child's bedroom, a stairwell. The same guide that fits an A4 sheet will fit the wall, because the geometry is stored as proportions and only turned into centimetres at the end.
Boards and panels
Odd shapes and awkward proportions are no harder than a rectangle. The four corners go where the corners are.
When the room will not cooperate
Full screen and keeping the display awake are used only when the browser allows them. If it refuses, the view still works in the tab. A calibrated PNG and a raster PDF can be downloaded instead and thrown from anything, which is the safer plan for a borrowed projector or a venue you cannot test in advance.
Create your artwork