Last fall I started doing a series of talks and posts for my Patreon subscribers about working with grids.
There are tons of reasons you might want to do this but the main reason is to keep your momentum going when you find you don’t have a lot of time to make art.
Even if you only have five or ten minutes to sketch in a day you can fill up a grid square/circle/triangle/rectangle etc. Over the days these little bits build up into a delightful record.
Sketches that weren’t so great to begin with draw additional power from being a part of a whole. You can see how they led, through practice to another sketch later on. You can see the development of color palettes and the use of certain angles, or the focus that you take when you go right to the subject that matters the most to you.
I think grids are also great as a way to bring back play into your journal or sketchbook.
The funny thing was I started the post series because of some injured subscribers, to encourage them. Then I found myself in the hospital and later recovering from my own injury and I kept working in grids because I’d already set up that pattern.
I still dip into grids now and then. Today’s image is a page in my journal that I did in 2 parts. The top row was the first day, the bottom row was the second day. I started by taping off the rectangles with masking tape, as you can see from the out lines. How I filled it just turned out to be my mood on the next two days.
I was looking at the Museum app for muses since I’m still housebound. And I was working with a Sakura Professional brush pen FB, Schmincke pan watercolors, and a discontinued hot press watercolor paper with gelatin sizing that I had bound into an 8 inch square sketchbook.
If your sketching or journaling is sporadic and you’d like to make it daily but don’t think you have the time, take another look at your schedule. Then think about grids—you can get a lot done in a little time with a grid. And at the end of the week you’ll have a fun record your creative efforts, an idea of the directions you want to go and to grow in, and the momentum that comes with daily work.
