Every artist is likely familiar with the grid system to enlarge or transfer drawings. While this method has certainly worked for me in the past, I’ve always avoided it because I hate gridding over my drawings, and because it’s so painfully tedious.
I’ve generally preferred scanning the drawing in, shrinking it down and reprinting it small enough to fit on the projector to project it onto my surface. The problems with this are that it has to be dark when I do it, I have to have a surface light enough to fit on the easel, and I need quite a bit of space. Since I’ve been painting on various scraps of boards lately (most of them quite heavy), and have very little space to work with, I wasn’t getting very excited about this method. In addition, I ran out of printer ink and was forced to come up with a new solution anyway.
I had an 11×14 drawing that needed to be blown up to twice it’s size. I scanned the drawing into Photoshop, adjusted the grid sizes to match my grid paper, and resized the sketch to match the size I’m transferring. I scanned the drawing in at a pretty high resolution, but it really wasn’t needed. At just 16%, the drawing was big enough to see detail and was crisp. No need to view it at full scale. From there, I simply transferred it to my grid paper. Now, my paper was not nearly big enough, so it took 5 sheets, but it was seamless. The surface I’m painting on is already gridded to match the paper, so getting it to there will be super easy. I suppose you can always use transfer paper to do this too.
I am, of course, pretty happy that my original drawing is grid-free, I didn’t have to reprint the drawing (which would have been smaller than the original anyway), I can work in day light, and the amount of gridding I have to do is cut in half (such a tedious process – I hate it).
Yes, I’m kicking myself for not experimenting with this long ago.. it’s so simple and obvious! And, while this may seem like old hat to some of you, it may come as new info to others so I wanted to share.
Happy painting!
