Grid maker › Choosing a grid size
How many squares should your grid have?
Finer grids buy accuracy and cost hours. Coarser grids are quicker and leave more of you in the drawing. Here is how to choose without guessing.
This is the decision people get wrong most often, usually by going too fine. A 30-column grid on a simple still life does not make the drawing better — it makes it slow, and it turns an exercise in seeing into an exercise in copying. The right grid is the coarsest one that still keeps you accurate.
The one-feature rule
Start from the smallest thing you actually care about getting right. An eye in a portrait, a window in a building, a paw in an animal study. That feature should occupy roughly one to two cells.
Any smaller and you are copying noise — grain and compression artefacts rather than form. Any larger and the cell stops helping, because you are back to judging a complex shape by eye inside a big empty square.
Sizes by subject
| Subject | Columns | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Blocking in a still life | 4–6 | Enough to place large masses without slowing you down |
| Landscape or building | 8–12 | Straight edges and horizons check easily against grid lines |
| Pet or animal portrait | 12–16 | Fur has no landmarks, so smaller cells keep proportions honest |
| Human portrait | 16–24 | Eyes, nostrils and lip corners need cell-level precision |
| Full figure with detail | 20–30 | Hands and faces stay accurate at reduced scale |
| Mural or canvas transfer | 6–10 | Match whatever grid you can physically chalk on the wall |
| Speed studies and practice | 3–4 | Trains your eye without letting you copy cell by cell |
Rows follow the photo, not your preference
Pick your column count first, then let the rows fall out of the image proportions. If you set both by hand you will almost certainly end up with rectangular cells, and a rectangular cell on the photo copied into a square cell on paper stretches the drawing.
The grid maker has a Keep cells square option that calculates the rows for you. Turn it on and forget about it.
When to use fewer squares than you think
If you are gridding to learn rather than to produce a finished piece, go coarse. Three or four columns forces you to judge most of the shape yourself and only use the grid as a sanity check. That is the version of the exercise that improves freehand proportion; a 30-column grid mostly improves your ability to use a 30-column grid.
When to use more
Go finer when the subject has no internal landmarks — dense foliage, fur, crowds, crumpled fabric — or when you are working much larger than the reference. The bigger the jump in scale, the more a small error at the reference end multiplies on the paper.
Detail where you need it
You do not have to use one grid for the whole picture. A practical approach for portraits: grid the full image at 8 columns and block everything in, then grid just the head at 16 and refine. Two passes, each at a sensible density, beats one punishing 30-column pass.
If you are practising for an exam or a class
Timed drawing work rewards a coarse grid. Six to eight columns is usually enough to place a still life or a figure correctly inside the time limit, and it keeps the marks looking drawn rather than transferred. Save the sixteen-column grids for studio pieces where accuracy matters more than speed.
A quick sanity check
Once you have set a grid, look at the readout under the canvas. It tells you how many squares you have created in total. Somewhere between 50 and 300 is comfortable for most drawings. Under 30 and the grid is barely helping; over 600 and you are signing up for a long evening.
Try it on your own reference
The grid maker is free, runs in your browser and never uploads your photo.
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