Your First Week of Drawing: Grid Drawing

Take-away: by placing grids over photographs, you can compare the angle and length of shapes to straight lines. This helps you to draw it correctly.

Reading Time: 5min + 30min practice (each day)

I uploaded a lot of pictures for this post. Let me know if the page loads slowly, then I’ll move the extra pictures to an album on Imgur ^_^

1. What is Grid Drawing?

If you read part 1 of Your First Week of Drawing (you can find it here), then you know that we want to see the world as a combination of shapes and angles. But like learning to run, you first have to go through the phases of crawling and walking.

So we take the picture we want to draw and place a grid over it like this:

The paper we will draw on gets the same grid.

What does this do? Instead of having to abstract the whole horse’s head, you can now focus on just the shapes within one square. While drawing, you tackle square by square. It’s like taking little bites instead of cramming the whole cake in your mouth.

2. Demo – Exercise Example

You can follow along with me, or choose a different picture if you don’t like horses. The other pictures are at the end of this post under “Day 1” 🙂

Choose one that you like, print it out and start sketching!

STEP 1: First we look at intersections between the big shapes of the horse and the grid.

We look at the place where the horse shape crosses the line of the grid and try to estimate that location on the grid on our paper.

To help you estimate the correct location, ask yourself questions like “Is it halfway or less than halfway of the line?”

Make as many or as little as you want – when we continue drawing, you can always add more marks.

STEP 2: Now we have bunch of dots, we can look at the shape between them.

Take the ear for example. Inside the square, what does the shape look like between the marks that you made? Is it a curve or a straight line? Does it go down first or does it go up?

We can also add in an extra dot to estimate the tip of the ear. How far from the edges of the grid is it? Breaking it down into nothing but dots and lines, we’ve now drawn the ear!

Is this familiar to you? It’s like creating your own connect-the-dots drawing!

STEP 3: Just like the ear, we keep analyzing the shapes between different marks of the grid.

Little by little we outline the horse. For a difficult shape, you can first lightly sketch it or use a dotted line before committing to the final line.

Every part of the horse is just an abstract shape that we’re expressing with a line.

STEP 4: The most difficult shapes are those that flow through some empty space, like the halter of the horse. The technique is still the same. Compare to the edges of the grid. How far up does the line go? How curved is it?

It’s about done at this stage!

STEP 5: for the last step, you can clean up your lines and add in details. Experiment if you like, you’ll make thousands of drawings over your life time. If you experiment and you don’t like the result, you can always draw it again! And if you do like the result, you’re one step closer to creating your own drawing style.

It doesn’t have to be a perfect copy. If you look at my example for a long time, you’ll see spots where I’m off a bit or my line is not rounded enough and more details like that. But it looks like the horse in the picture, right?

So how did it go? Do you feel like you are better at seeing shapes objectively?

3. Why do we start with this exercise?

Grid drawing simplifies drawing. It breaks it up in small manageable chunks, exactly what we want as a beginner. When you look at the drawing square by square, you prevent your brain from going “Horse! Let’s symbol draw!“. Instead, the grid makes it a lot easier to see just shapes and lines.

This is easy! Can I draw with a grid forever?

Grid drawing is a temporary exercise, like riding a bicycle with safety wheels. Eventually, you will ditch the safety wheels and never look back.

You might encounter online backlash when posting your grid drawings. Why? If your drawing looks very good, but has a grid on it, people might bash you for it. That’s a compliment! See it as people telling you that you’re ahead of this stage already 🙂

We’re training your artist’s eye. Eventually, you’ll be able to abstract shapes so you can draw 3D-ideas with 2D-lines.

5. Getting Rid of The Grid

Grid drawing can teach you bad habits too. That’s why we’ll combine it with life drawing (this will be in part 3 of Your First Week of Drawing).

As we’re training your eye, we’ll slowly get rid of the grid. Like learning to walk, the first day is more like crawling. The whole picture is covered in squares!

By the end of the week, the only thing left will be a simple cross like this: example

6. More Exercises

Below are extra references, sorted by day. You can also make your own grid drawings! Use a photo editing program that you have or a site like IMGonline. What you want to do is overlaying the two images.

Using IMGonline (overlay images):

Choose the image you want to draw
From the below galleries, choose the amount of squares you want
Upload both images to imgonline, in the same order (image first, squares second)
Choose these settings:
Click “OK” & then choose “download processed image” on the next page.
Enjoy your drawing break! 🙂