Grids for Paintings: Materials

Series Summary

Painting is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions, and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, we have records of men and women making graphic representations of their world, showing their understanding and their curiosity. Creating a grid is an excellent way to work out abstract patterns for your painting and drawing. This technique is also helpful when enlarging photos or sketches for large format paintings. In this free art lesson video, an art instructor will demonstrate how to draw a grid and create abstract patterns within the grid. She will also show you how to grid a small image to be transferred to a larger scale. The lesson includes variations on the standard grid and tips for distorting an image to scale using the grid. Also find out how to combine images on a grid.

Video Transcript

"When you're making a grid you are going to need certain materials. You are going to need a ruler. I suggest one with a cork back because it's easier to keep it, hold it where you need it to hold. A triangle is a good idea because that way you can make sure that you get square. That's how you square up things. You set the triangle against the ruler and where those two meet is going to be a forty-five degree, a ninety degree angle and that's usually what you want to work with. So you need those things. If you're going to do something within a circle, you're probably going to need a compass and to draw your grid, you're usually going to want to use a light weight pencil. For those of you who aren't familiar with pencil weights, they go from 9H at one side, so 9H is over here to 9H on the other side, 9B on the other side. And the Bs are dark. And you go progressively darker. A 9B is as dark as you can possibly get. A 9H is as light as you can possibly get. And then in the middle they have a whole bunch called F, H, and B and those are all sort of medium weights. You want to stick to the light side to make your grid because you don't want, you don't necessarily want to see the lines. You don't want to end up with an outline of your grid like this, so you use a light pencil to make the grid so that you can erase it later and you don't have this big grid sitting there in the middle."