Final Drawing Assembly in Affinity Photo

For those of you interested, here is the final drawing for the current commission painting opened in Affinity Photo to show how it was assembled from all 12 separate preparatory drawings. 

For the final drawing, rather than just taking photos of the separate drawings, I took them to my local Kinkos and scanned them it at high resolution on the large format scanner. I then pulled all twelve drawings into Affinity Photo, cleaned them up, isolated the important sections, and cut-and-pasted them into separate layers of one large document. I scaled the document at 200 DPI and a full 96x40 inches (19200 x 8000 pixels).

When I did the drawing for the background, I first used a charcoal transfer to transfer the outlines of the figures in their final positions onto the paper so that the background could be designed around them. Later, when assembling the final drawing in Affinity Photo, I used those light outlines to guide the placement of the figures over the background.

Once the drawing was finalized, I divided it into five sections, and saved each as a PDF file. PDF files are encoded with precise scaling information that can be used by any computer/printer to ensure document prints out at the right size. I then took these PDF files back to Kinkos on a USB drive and printed them out at full size. These print outs are what was used to perform the oil transfer onto the 96x40-inch aluminum composite panel on which the actual painting will be painted.