Recently I read a blog article on drawing and learnt about the grid method and how this can help an artist achieve accurate proportions in their drawings. Intrigued I decided that I needed to try this immediately and quickly found myself an online tool which just needed a picture to work with. As just a week ago I sketched out a camping kettle I realised that this would make an excellent subject; within moments this lead me to picture set up for copying from:
The reason for choosing this number of squares is that I wanted each square to contain detail that I could reasonably capture freehand without having so many squares that I'd spend all of my time drawing them and rubbing them out. By changing the scale of the image I also manipulated the image so that each square was 3cm*3cm in size and the whole fitted nicely to a page of my sketchbook:
Here I have the outline of the kettle along with those contour details which, to my eye, appeared the most significant. There's no doubt that this is the most accurate picture that I've ever created even though all of the lines were drawn freely - I just had more support from the grid to see where lines actually went rather than trying to perform that mapping in my head. A nice technique.