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Twelve grid drawing tips

The difference between a gridded drawing that breathes and one that looks traced is a handful of habits. These are the ones that matter.

While you set up

1. Rule the grid lighter than feels useful

A 2H pencil and very little pressure. You will be erasing these lines while a finished drawing sits on top of them, and a grooved line stays visible long after the graphite is gone.

2. Number the cells in the margin, not the drawing

Write your row letters and column numbers just outside the drawing area. Labels inside the picture get erased along with the grid and take some of your drawing with them.

3. Use grayscale for the reference when you are working in pencil

Colours that look completely different often share the same value. A red and a green of equal darkness will fool you into drawing contrast that is not there. Switch the reference to B&W in the grid maker and you see the tones you actually have to render.

While you draw

4. Mark entry and exit points first

For each cell, note where a line enters and where it leaves before drawing the curve between them. Two accurate points make the shape between them almost draw itself; a beautiful curve between two wrong points is worthless.

5. Draw the negative space

The gap between an arm and a torso is a shape with a describable silhouette, and your brain has no preconception about it. Drawing gaps is the fastest way to catch a proportion error.

6. Work in passes, not corners

Complete all the major contours lightly across the whole picture before refining anything. Finishing the top-left corner first pushes every accumulated error into the bottom-right.

7. Compare diagonally, not just side to side

Check a cell against the one diagonally opposite as well as its immediate neighbours. Errors that are invisible between adjacent cells show up clearly across a diagonal.

8. Use the cell centre

Turn on per-cell diagonals in the grid maker and every square gets an X marking its centre. Then you are not judging "about a third of the way down" — you are judging above or below a visible point.

9. Squint at the reference

Narrowing your eyes collapses detail into masses of light and dark. If the big masses are right, the detail has somewhere to sit. If they are wrong, no amount of detail rescues the drawing.

While you finish

10. Step back every ten cells

A metre of distance shows you in two seconds what an hour of close work hides. Stiffness, lopsidedness and value problems are all distance problems.

11. Erase the grid sooner than feels safe

As soon as the drawing holds together on its own, the scaffolding goes. Working over visible grid lines keeps you in copying mode, and copying mode is what makes drawings look mechanical.

12. Finish the last ten percent freehand

Soften an edge, deepen a shadow, let one line run past where it technically should. These small decisions are yours rather than the photograph's, and they are the difference between a transfer and a drawing.

If your drawings still look traced

It is almost always one of three things: the grid stayed on until the end, every line got the same weight and pressure, or the drawing reproduces photographic detail that the eye would never notice in life. Vary your line weight, leave some areas unresolved, and let the grid go early.