enlarging an image – My Drawing Course

For this project of ‘Enlarging an Image‘ I was instructed in the course materials that I needed two acetate grids, one with small squares across it and the other with large squares printed on it.

As instructed I went out and bought a roll of acetate and card and made myself two acetate grids, one small and one big and glued them to card so I could use them as view finders. I managed to slice my finger open with a Stanley knife while making the big one so you can see the dodgy line where the CD marker hit the big chunky bandage.

Acetate Grids for Enlarging an Image - My new scaling tools — Acetate Grids for Enlarging an Image – My new scaling tools

Unfortunately I didn’t get to use them as I didn’t really need to because I was also instructed to draw a grid with an HB pencil over the small image, where as I could have placed the small grid over the image in my A5 sketchbook instead; but I can see they will be getting plenty of use in the future. The size of the squares on the small grid are 2cm, the size of the squares on the large grid are 4cm, I think I also need to make those 2cm as well.

For this exercise I drew a thumbnail drawing of my favourite coffee cup roughly 10 cm square in my small A5 sketchbook, which I’ve barely put to use so was good to fill a page or 2. Once I had finished the thumbnail drawing I drew a grid of 2 cm squares with an HB pencil over my thumbnail sketch.

Enlarging an existing image 1 — Enlarging an existing image – A5 sketchbook

In my A4 sketchbook I drew 3 cm squares, deciding they were a perfect size for this object on this size paper, with a larger more detailed composition I would have probably needed smaller squares in both sketchbooks.

Enlarging an existing image - A4 Sketchbook — Enlarging an existing image – A4 Sketchbook

To make it easier for myself to identify which squares I would be drawing in I labelled the squares with letters down the left hand side and numbers across the top. However the drawing was quite low in my A5 sketchbook so in my A4 sketchbook I started at B instead of A lifting the drawing up 1 square.

Enlarging an existing image using grids — Enlarging an existing image – side by side

I loved this ‘Enlarging an Existing Image’ exercise, it was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle but a hell of a lot easier and as the squares weren’t that big quite easy to judge where a line curves or which point of the grid they would meet. Admittedly I did do a little bit of rubbing out with an eraser but not that much.

Tag: enlarging an image

Scaling Tools for Enlarging an Image – Acetate Grids

Enlarging an Existing Image