Scaling Up Your Pictures using Square Drawing
I was asked two questions recently to do with our Square Drawing system, it's a feature of the grids that will help with scaling up (or down) your pictures.
Firstly, let's talk about the A4 1 inch transparent grid included the pack. One of our customers wanted to know if I would consider making a larger transparent grid so that they could use it to help produce larger paintings.They great thing is that this isn't necessary. You can use the 1 inch A4 transparent grid and copy it onto a paper grid marked out in larger squares. In fact you can make the paper grid you are drawing on any size you wish.You then follow what you see on your reference photo square by square looking through the transparent grid placed over it. Generally speaking I would not recommend using a paper grid more that twice the size (i.e. 2 inches square) as there is a danger of distortion when copying through.I was also asked whether you can use Square Drawing Grids for Oil Painting and if the graphite interferes with oil paint. Well, it does depend on what kind of surface you are painting on. If the canvas or canvas board is fairly smooth then this could be done reasonably well.
If you are using a Tracedown carbon then the graphite could react slightly to the oil. The way to avoid this is to lightly remove a little of the graphite leaving just a trace with an eraser. Then redraw using a harder graphite pencil (a HB would be ideal).Or if you prefer, go over the Tracedown graphite (without erasing) using a HB pencil and then use an eraser lightly. This would remove the Tracedown graphite but leave the HB more or less intact. The HB graphite marks are less likely to transfer to the oil paint.There's two options to our square drawing grids that we thought we would share with you. If you want to share this article with others, click the links below the video.