Tips for Grid Drawing

Turn One Big Drawing Into Lots of Little Ones

A complicated picture can feel intimidating when you look at it as a whole. Grid drawing changes the problem completely. Instead of trying to reproduce an entire face, animal, building, or landscape at once, you divide both the reference and your drawing surface into matching squares and concentrate on one small section at a time.

You're no longer drawing a cat. You're drawing a curved line entering one side of a square, a small triangle in another, and a patch of shadow somewhere else.

Eventually all those little pieces meet—and there's your cat.

Grid drawing is especially useful for learning proportion and observation because it encourages you to draw what you actually see, rather than what your brain thinks an object ought to look like.

How It Works

Choose a reference image and place an evenly spaced grid over it. You can draw one lightly, use a transparent overlay, or add a grid digitally before printing your reference.

Create a grid with the same number of rows and columns on your drawing paper.

The two grids don't have to be physically the same size. In fact, that's one of the clever things about this method. A small reference divided into 4 × 6 squares can be reproduced on a much larger sheet divided into the same 4 × 6 arrangement.

Now work square by square.

Pay attention to where lines enter and leave each square, where shapes intersect the grid, and how much empty space surrounds them.

Don't Draw the Object

This sounds peculiar, but try temporarily forgetting what you're drawing.

If you're copying a bird, don't think:

That's the bird's wing.

Think:

This line begins about a quarter of the way down the left edge, curves toward the center, and leaves near the bottom.

Why?

Because the moment your brain says wing, it starts supplying its own idea of what a wing looks like. Grid drawing teaches your eye to override that assumption.

Try It: The Upside-Down Challenge

Choose a simple reference—a shoe, teacup, flower, mushroom, or animal portrait works well.

Add a 4 × 4 grid.

Then turn the reference upside down before you begin drawing.

Yes, really.

Work one square at a time without turning it right-side up to check your progress. Concentrate only on lines, angles, curves, shapes, and spaces.

When you've completed the basic drawing, turn both images around.

You may be surprised by how accurate it is. Turning the image upside down makes it harder for your brain to rely on familiar symbols and encourages you to actually observe the shapes in front of you.

Making Your Grid Disappear

Draw your working grid as lightly as possible. A hard graphite pencil such as an H or 2H can be useful because it produces a lighter mark than a very soft pencil.

Once your drawing is established, gently erase the grid before adding heavy colored pencil.

Don't press hard enough when creating the grid to indent the paper. Even after the graphite is erased, those grooves can remain—and colored pencil has an uncanny talent for finding every one of them.

Want to Enlarge an Image?

Grid drawing also gives you a wonderfully low-tech enlargement method.

Suppose your reference is 4 × 6 inches and you want an 8 × 12 inch drawing. Divide the reference into one-inch squares and your larger paper into two-inch squares, keeping the same number of squares in each direction.

Copy the contents square by square and you've doubled the image while preserving its proportions.

No projector required.

Edenglow Studio Tip

When a square looks wrong, compare the empty spaces—not just the object.

The shape of the space beside an ear, beneath a branch, or between two petals can reveal proportion mistakes faster than staring at the object itself.

Grid drawing isn't cheating. It's a centuries-old family of techniques for transferring and enlarging designs, and more importantly, it's an excellent exercise in learning to see before you draw.

This is how I taught myself to draw at age 32 - a pencil, a pad of paper, a ruler and a library book.  Yes, really.