Grid Drawing with Ginger Geftakys

Hi, I’m Ginger. I'm going to teach you how to draw with a grid.

Grid drawing is a process that uses horizontal and vertical lines laid over an image to break that image up into smaller boxes. This enables the artist to draw each box in proportion. Grid drawing is a process that artists have used for many centuries dating way back to the ancient Egyptians who used it to carve their images in stone century after century in accurate proportion. Although grid drawing is more challenging and technical than observation drawing, even young children can use it successfully if the image that they're drawing is quite simple and only a few boxes are used.

Grid drawing was successfully used by the artist to draw the image in accurate proportions.

Today I'm going to show you how to use a grid. The first thing I'm going to do is take you to a practice session that I held with one of my classes on an earlier day to show them how to use the grid. It's a practice exercise that I recommend for every class of students or every person learning to use a grid for the first time. Because it teaches the eye and the brain to work together and how to analyze the image. After we look at the class then we're going to come back and I'm going to show you how to make a simple grid for your own drawing, how to draw various images, and last of all, I'll show you artwork drawn by students of various ages using the grid drawing technique.