10 Steps to Using Grids for Sketching (on Lunch Break)

As I’ve said elsewhere on the blog, I believe designers should draw as often as possible. One of the best exercises, time-tested over hundreds of years of fine art tradition, is copying the Masters. But can you do this on lunch break? Sure—with a little help from a grid! Grids aren’t just for layout you know. They were used for painting long before they were used for page layout. Try this for a few lunch break sessions and you’ll be a master-sketcher of the Masters in no time.

How to sketch a copy of a Master painting on lunch break

Without getting into philosophy, here are the details and the example:

1. Get an image of a painting you like and paste it into Photoshop
2. Crop the image to the detail you want to work on
3. Add a grid to the image using this tutorial: How to create a grid quickly and easily with Photoshop. Be sure not to make the grid too small. My example is a 3 x 3 grid, of a roughly 300px x 300px image.
4. Leave the image up on your computer screen
5. Create a grid with the same number of squares in your sketchbook [sketchbook]
6. Squint and lightly pencil in the main lines and angles
7. Rinse, wash, repeat until you have it blocked out. Move around from block to block and don’t sweat the details
8. When you have enough blocked in, start sweating some details, in layers
9. Progressively add more tone to the sketch until lunch break is over
10. Don’t over work it, but repeat at lunch tomorrow

Here are a couple of shots of the fruit of my labor, 30-45 mins, having followed those exact steps. Click to enlarge. Enjoy! The orignal 300 x 300 image I cropped: P.S. Yes, his ring finger is a little odd 🙂