stevo's Journal

 This is a technique that I never shared with anyone before. A conversation with someone here on DS had prompted me to copy it here.

Do you have Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand or Corel Draw? A vector drawing tool. 

Take the inches (or metric) dimensions of the Photoshop image. This is assumed to be a rectangle. 

Make a rectangle box the inch size of the Photoshop image in Adobe Illustrator. Make sure the "show rulers" is on or go to the tool bar at top and under view scroll down to "show rulers". 

Select the box and Zoom in to the center node and pull a vertical guide on the center node and then a horizontal guide onto the center node. Take the pen tool and make a vertical line bisecting the box right on the guide you just made, (hold down the shift key at the same time which makes the line perfectly point to point.) Then do the same bisecting the box, north and south. Now take the pen tool and make a diagonal line from bottom left corner to upper right corner. Then repeat for the other corner to corner. Go see the picture files that I just uploaded to my "My Photos & Videos" page in my Daily Strength account. I uploaded 2 images for you to show you. 

There's a significance to this type of grid. In Adobe Illustrator you can "select all" then "group" the whole scalable grid. Make sure that line only is selected when creating this grid. That way there is no white fill. 

Here in those 2 screen shots, I arbitrarily made the scaling box 3" X 5". See how each unit is a replica proportional rectangle to the overall shape rectangle? This gives you more line guides than a regular "quadrille grid" or ordinary scaling grid. I like the added diagonals because it gives you more to hang on to when you are drawing the finished piece to scale. 

Copy/Paste the whole grid onto your Adobe Photoshop image that you selected to scale. 
Flatten this and (save as) save it to a new filename. Print this out. 

Stretch a canvas to whatever ... this grid I made 5" X 3", so hypothetically a canvas that is 30 inches wide by 18 inches tall would have the same aspect ratio (proportional scaling). 

Now, on the white canvas ... create the same grid as before in graphite pencil. Do the whole grid exactly the same as the print. 

Then start drawing the basic shapes of the Photoshop image. You eventually obliterate all the grid lines, however by that time you have all the elements in place anyway. 

This scaling method is my own invention and isn't copied from any art book of technique. Art books tell you about quadrille square grids for this type of scaling. Quadrilles never work for me because there is always a half section left over at 2 of the sides. 

Once you make a grid in Illustrator, you can proportionally stretch it to grid any other artwork. You can import the Photoshop image into Illustrator as a lower layer then stretch the grid to fit. Then copy paste the new grid as an overlay onto your Photoshop image. 

Each division rectangle is the identical aspect ratio of the overall perimeter of your image.