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Early Use

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Grids make people uneasy. The student, the seasoned artist too, most often looks over her shoulder before starting to stealthily draw the lines on their canvas for a grid. Why? Because it makes it so much faster and easier to draw an image properly that it feels like, well, cheating.

Allow me to set your mind at rest. There is absolutely no doubt that artists of a stature like da Vinci, Dürer, Vermeer and van Gogh employed drawing grids for their drawings and paintings, and if they could do it, well we can too, especially when you first start to learn how to draw. The important thing is to keep drawing grids in their place; they should be a tool, not a crutch. Don't forget to practice drawing without these tools, to develop your eyes' accuracy.

Let's take a brief look at where the idea of using drawing grids began; it is useful for understanding how they work.

A Room with a View

In the early 15th century the Florentine artist Bruneschelli conducted a famous experiment that demonstrated fundamental rules of perspective drawing; it wasn't long before Renaissance artists in Florence and Italy at large were using perspective to striking effect in their paintings.

Alberti's drawing grid, or "veil".

For practical reasons it is most likely that it was for demonstration purposes only, but the concept is an important one for us: the window corresponds to what is called the "picture plane".

Let's look at it another way. In the Renaissance artists liked to describe how perspective works by using the metaphor of the archer and the arrow. Just as an archer closes one eye and looks down the length of his arrow to aim at a determined target, the artist should imagine a line from his eye to the picture's vanishing point.

Alberti imagined this visual ray and others as the artist looked up and down, which formed a cone of lines radiating from the artist's eye. The picture plane, as shown below in my drawing, is like a pane of glass intercepting these rays.

Want to test it? All you have to do is go to a real window and look at a tree or building through the glass. Shut one eye, and with your finger, you can easily outline the shape on the glass. In so doing, you are drawing on Alberti's picture plane. But how easy would it be for you to copy that shape, in the right proportions, on a separate piece of paper? And what if you wanted to make your drawing bigger or smaller than that window's size?

This is where drawing grids come in.

Renaissance artists developed perspective drawing into a very sophisticated, mathematical art. But by the early 16th century the best way of reproducing a scale image still remained that of tracing the outlines on a sheet of glass, as Alberti and da Vinci as well had written of: the "artist's glass", of which an example is shown at the top of this page.

Illustration from Dürer's "Treatise of Measurement" showing the method of producing a scale image by marking the outlines of the object on a sheet of glass - in other words, the "picture plane".

In 1506 the German artist Albrecht Dürer immersed himself in Italian Renaissance art theory and after traveling to Italy, wrote an extremely influential "Treatise of Measurement" that included some now-famous illustrations of perspective devices.

In this famous illustration we see Dürer's drawing grid, also known as "the draughtsman's net".

The gadget that interests us most is Dürer's "draughtsman's net", based on da Vinci's similar device, itself based on Alberti's grid (also sometimes called "Alberti's veil). It consisted of a square wooden frame with a net of black threads forming a grid. The artist's viewpoint was fixed by use of an eyepiece set at a distance twice the height of the grid. Then the artist looks through the frame and copies the outlines of what he sees onto a piece of paper with a similar grid marked on it.

What This Means For You

Today, grids are still very much in use. In France even today, while rare, it is still possible to find a pocket grid called an "oeil de vieux" (an "old man's eye") that landscapers can use to sketch out their ideas.

If you want to copy an image, gridding up the original and transferring it to your gridded paper or canvas will be faster, easier and just plain more accurate. No, it's not cheating! If guys like Michelangelo and Raphael can do it, then it's ok for us to do it!

You may want to take a look at my translation of Alberti's thoughts on the usefulness of grids. It is also interesting to read what Van Gogh had to say about them.

Want to give it a try? Take a look at the page on the various grid drawing methods, including a discussion of the problem of aspect ratio - in other words, keeping things from getting distorted as you make your picture bigger or smaller than the original.

Think you might like to buy a grid? I have several available in my Art Store for purchase: the "Vincent Van Gogh" grid, the "Dürer" grid, and the French " oeil de vieux" ("old man's eye") pocket grid.

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Grids make people uneasy. The student, the seasoned artist too, most often looks over her shoulder before starting to stealthily draw the lines on their canvas for a grid. Why? Because it makes it so much faster and easier to draw an image properly that it feels like, well, cheating.

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Virtual Instructor Video

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Blind Contour Line Drawing- Line Drawing Exercises

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Learn how to create a blind contour line drawing and it's significance in drawing development in this free art lesson.

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Introduction / Test Setup

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Jody 2

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'I only have half a brain' - BBC Stories

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Jody 1

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Little Girl

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54 Question Online Test

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Take the Right Brain vs Left Brain Dominance Test - find your educational and career paths today at OurCareerColleges

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Take our leading online 50 multiple choice Brain Dominance Test and discover if you are right brain dominant

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Clockwise R or Counter L?

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Which way is the dancer spinning... clockwise or counter-clockwise?

Most people will see her turning counter-clockwise, which apparently means you're more left brained (logical). I see her spinning that way, and it's at first almost impossible to imagine her going clockwise. But it happens, usually by focusing or when something unexpectedly alters your perception.

Here's the typical run down on left versus right brain:
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
"big picture" oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can "get it" (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

Many people associate the right brain with creativity and lateral thinking, and there's certainly something to that. Our left brains create structures that can act as barriers to alternative solutions and perspectives.

But your left brain plays a crucial role in creativity as well. Seeing logical associations between seemingly unrelated things is a hallmark of creativity. And the critical-thinking skills necessary to tell a good idea from a bad one are pretty important too.

So... tell us which way your dancer spins for you in the comments. And weigh in with your opinion about the right brain versus left brain for creativity... isn't it a really a "whole mind" thing?

P.S. Want to know how this optical illusion works? Read this.
About the Author: Brian Clark is a new media entrepreneur and co-founder of Lateral Action. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.

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Which Way Do You Spin... Left Brain or Right Brain?

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Which way is the dancer spinning... clockwise or counter-clockwise? Most people will see her turning counter-clockwise, which apparently means you're more left brained (logical). I see her spinning that way, and it's at first almost impossible to imagine her going clockwise. But it happens, usually by focusing or when something unexpectedly alters your perception.

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Brain Hemispheres

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Discuss this video: http://reddit.com/r/cgpgrey http://www.cgpgrey.com Music: http://www.daveconservatoire.org/ Watch the other part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVmkDUkZT4&feature=youtu.be - Mark Govea - Wenhao Nie - Thomas J Miller Jr MD - dedla - Robert Kunz - Daniel Slater - Saki Comandao - PervertedThomas - John Buchan - Christian Cooper - Michael Little - Ripta Pasay -

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Ganzaga

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Ganzaga

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Dr. Ganzaga's Patient

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To reduce the severity of his seizures, Joe had the bridge between his left and right cerebral hemisphers (the corpus callosum) severed. As a result, his left and right brains no longer communicate through that pathway. Here's what happens as a result:

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Tracing From Nature
Using the Picture Plane

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Social Awareness

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Program Overview