Grid

I took this the other day and would have got more of the doves, but a cat tried to get them so cue me pushing open the window and hissing at the cat :p :/ I know I go on and on about the cats in the area, but if you have to pick up your dog waste, why don't you have to pick up your cat waste? Or keep your cat inside. I know of a few towns where the cat population was so bad that they brought in bylaws limiting the number of cats you could have and if it was caught outside without a tag on, and the owner could not be found it was either adopted back out or put down. Some people might think that is harsh, but people were getting sick from having to clean up the waste and getting attacked. (and before anyone says its only a cat, I have seen what a cat bite can do and its not pretty.)

We have had people tell us that their cat would never make a mess in our garden, yeah so that orange tabby that I chased away isn't your cat? I like cats, I really do but I wish people here would realize that letting them out does the area more harm then good. On any given day there are 10-15 cats on the street and not all of them have homes because people don't fix their cats.

Besides having to clean up the mess they make, they kill a lot of the wildlife in the area that is already in bad shape (or breed with wild cats :/). I know most people know this, I just wish the people around here would wake up :/

ok I'm done ranting :p

So this is how you would grid a drawing. Either print off your picture or if you have a photo editing program that will let you make even straight lines that will work too. I try to make the squares 1 inch by 1 inch, but if the drawing has a lot of detail I would make them half inch square.

Once you have your lines drawn, number the squares. Now take another piece of paper and draw another grid on it. On this piece I just used a 1 inch grid but you can make the squares smaller or bigger, it doesn't really matter as long as they are square and you have the same amount of squares as your print out. Number the squares the same as your photo.

I found the easiest way to grid is to treat each square like its quartered and to find a starting point like the tips of his ears. Make little ticks or dots where the parts of the item you are drawing touch a line of the square. Make sure to make your marks in the right numbered square. I have a lot of times had to start over because I made the dots either a square above or a square to the side which throws everything out.

After you have made the dots its just like playing connect the dots but you do have to sometimes ignore the grid to make things work out; ex. areas in the centre of the squares where you might have a hard time judging where things are in relation to parts that touch the lines of the squares and sometimes the dots just don't line up so you have to eye everything.

I use to think using a grid was cheating but really you still have to colour what you have grided and if you don't have any type of enlarger its an easy way to shrink or enlarge an image to the size you want. I've done this with a huge mural I was painting to small intricate drawings. It can sometimes take longer to grid something then drawing it free hand and there are people that might think you are not an artist if you do grid things, but it works really well with getting angles and detail down.

Hopefully I will have this transfered on the good paper tomorrow. I would have loved to do this bigger but I don't have any big pieces of paper left.