How to Teach Children to Draw to Scale

Depicting animals of different sizes is a helpful process in understanding how to draw to scale.

Drawing to scale is one of the most important aspects for any artist to learn. An ability to draw or paint a likeness will need to be combined with an understanding of scale. Once learned properly, the rules of drawing to scale will remain with an artist, and make his or her future projects easier to complete. The younger the rules of drawing to scale are taught to a budding artist, the better. Teaching drawing to scale can also be explained to children in a simple way.

Things You'll Need

• Paper
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Eraser
• Print-out sketch example

Instructions

1. Give a sheet of paper and a pencil and ruler to each child, and also hand out a print-out of a sketch to each child. The sketch should be a very basic image of the head and torso of a man that has been constructed through the aid of a grid comprising of squares of equal size. The grid should be made up of twelve 1-inch squares, with there being three rows of four squares.

2. Ask the children to use their rulers and pencil to make up a grid of the same size as the sketch print-out. Next, ask them to study the print-out and so gain an understanding of how useful the grid method is in aiding the drawing to scale.

3. Tell the class to begin drawing the figure by using the grid as a guideline. The first part of the drawing should be the head, and be drawn in the top row of the grid. The left side of the head, from the artist's perspective, should fill up half of a square, and the right side of the head should fill up half of another square.

4. Instruct the children to begin drawing the body of the person. The shoulders should be drawn first and, like the head, be in one square for the left side and one for the right. The shoulders should curve outwards until they are touching the edges of the two squares they are in.

5. Explain that the rest of the torso should be connected to the two squares above. Both sides of the torso should touch the edge of the individual square that they are in. The sketch should be completed by connecting the sides of the torso with a horizontal line, which follows the line making up the bottom of the grid.

Tips & Warnings

• Another useful method of helping to understand how to draw to scale is to draw similar objects of different sizes. For children, this could be simple drawings of fish of different sizes.

• The squares need to be very accurately measured, otherwise there may be errors regarding capturing the right proportions.

Resources

• blackdouglas.com: Scale Drawing