Drawing Grids

4th December 2005

A handy little aid to planning out a drawing

These handy little tools are an extension of the view finder framer I use to decide on a composition. It's just thread wrapped round a card frame, takes half an hour to make one. You hold it out in front of you between you and the subject, parallel with your face, then transfer a rough grid to your paper, you can have the main features of a drawing roughed out in no time, no measuring required.

I recently came across this idea in 'Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'. It's very like the way I used to grid up mural designs for transferring onto walls, or grid up reproductions of paintings for transferring onto street canvasses - the difference being, of course, that you're applying the grid to the real world.

Apparently Van Gogh used a similar if more cumbersome grid, which he used to take out with him when he was learning to draw. Good company then.

This drawing was roughed out using the little hand held grid. Using the grid makes it a lot easier to see the subject as a series of interlocking shapes, since each shape has a grid line for at least one edge, making it very easy to transfer to the paper. You really are copying nature, at least in the relative positioning of the elements.

Betty Edwards, author of the above book, says that this stage of her teaching process more than any other seems to produce results with her students. She uses the grid to introduce her students to the concept of the picture plane.

Using the grid lets you transfer straight to seeing the world in purely spatial terms with no right brain exercising required. I have a feeling that Betty would get results from her students with this alone.

The bigger grid has been attached to a couple of chopsticks taped together, so that I can attach it to the camera tri-pod. I can then set it up in front of a still life or a portrait subject, and see the subject immediately as flat shapes of colour and tone.

Although I'm not as concerned with the quality of the drawing on the still lifes as I am with the colour, it's going to be a priority when I come to do portraits. I'm beginning to realise how far my drawing has to go.