Unlocking Precision: Using the Grid Method to Achieve Better Portraits

When it comes to drawing and painting there are a multitude of techniques that can help you to achieve the results you want. One such useful technique is the grid method, a systematic approach to drawing or transferring images onto a larger surface with accuracy and proportion, providing a structured framework for understanding composition, perspective, and spatial relationships.

What is the grid method?

The grid method enables you to break down the drawing process into smaller, manageable sections, by dividing the reference image and drawing surface into a grid of evenly spaced squares. You can then reproduce the contents of each square onto the corresponding section of the drawing surface.

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Capturing Life: A Comprehensive Guide to Working from Photographs (Copy)

As an artist and art tutor, I often emphasise the importance of drawing from life rather than relying solely on photographs. This is primarily because I believe that drawing from life provides artists with a more immersive and authentic experience, that will enable you to better capture the energy, movement, and essence of the subject in a way that would be difficult to replicate by working from photographs alone. As such, I often encourage artists to combine engaging directly with their surroundings, whether its sketching people in public spaces, drawing objects from observation, or capturing scenes from nature, with working from screens or printed photographs, so that they can develop a better understanding of key ideas such as, form, anatomy, and tone.

Beyond the idea of working from life, using photographs a reference for a subject has the potential to improve the process and quality of your drawing skills, making it a convenient and valuable tool for learning opportunities whether you're a beginner or a seasoned artist. As a result, I am entirely cognizant of the many reasons someone may choose to use a photograph as a reference material over drawing from life. For example, photographs offer artists the opportunity to depict a wide range of subjects, from landscapes and still life arrangements to portraits. This could then give you more control over lighting and composition, providing you with the consistency and stability that may be difficult to achieve when drawing from life. Consequently, there has been a noticeable shift in attitudes toward digital reference materials in approaches to art.

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A guide to tools for observational measuring – Part Two

The joy of life drawing is its directness, when you are in the life room, drawing from the human figure it is just you and the model, and how you draw in response their poses. However, contained in this dynamic is every problem you will face with looking. Life drawing defies preconceived ideas of the human body by challenging you to see the model as they are, rather than how you imagine them to be, in doing so, it creates a stimulating environment where sensation, perception and imagination can grow.

Those with prior experience of figure drawing often note the learning opportunities that are afforded, effectively improving your core drawing skills whilst fostering creativity. However, these same people will often note that when drawing from the human figure your drawing skills are never ‘mastered’, as both you and the model change, meaning the way you see the world today will not be the same as you see it tomorrow. As an art tutor I have found that any artist who has spent time in the life room, will face the same set of problem when drawing from the human figure. This will enviably lead you to spending a lot of time thinking about how you can improve your ability to observe and then draw. For developing your perceptual skills is key to your understanding of form, perspective, proportion and tone. 

To shift to a more robust approach to life drawing, one that will enable you to persist through different drawing challenges, it is important to develop your understanding of proportion and measurement. A Guide to Observational Measuring, Part One, is available from here and outlines different approaches to measuring that will support you to get to grips with measuring proportion. In this blog I will build on this by drawing your attention to different techniques that will train your eye to clearly see proportion, angles, and relationships in the human figure. Although each approach is described separately, they can be intermixed as needed. You may find one of the techniques easier than another, so give them all a try until you settle on the method(s) that work for you and help you to see more objectively.

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The Figure Drawing – Rapid Sketche

When drawing the figure, you will find that the most spontaneous and immediate drawings you will produce are during the gestural drawing stage, which are normally between 1 and five minutes. This is because rapid sketches encourage the act of capturing the essence of the pose; forcing you to focus on gesture and movement, which will help you to develop a sense of rhythm and flow in your drawings.

What’s more, by working quickly, the short poses will force you to observe and analyse the subject more efficiently so that you can experiment with more spontaneous different ways of capturing and expressing the most important characteristics of the model’s form, posture, and action.

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