To Grid or Not To Grid

Is it cheating to use a grid for your work?

This is a question I have often asked myself.

When it comes to producing portraits, I am an absolute stickler for accuracy. I hugely admire artists who are able to capture the essence of a person in a flurry of brushstrokes but I have always been drawn to absolute realism when it comes to painting a likeness.

Anna - Oil on canvas

When I started painting Anna, I used the grid method to get the basic proportions onto the canvas. However, over the next few days it soon became a constant battle of painting a hair’s breadth away from the canvas to walking across to the other side of the room to see how she looked from a distance. Each time I made the smallest tweak, it changed the whole portrait but something still didn’t look right.

It was only when I studied a number of photos of Anna that I could pinpoint what about her didn’t look right. Unbelievably it was her lip line. Once I reworked those crucial millimetres, suddenly the painting came to life and I could see my friend staring back at me.

So for me, using a grid isn’t cheating at all - it’s simply the building blocks of a many-staged process and the magic of portraiture still lies in the smallest of marks.