Using a grid program for portraits. Is it "cheating?"

Lately I have been encouraging my students and even some friends of mine to try out a grid program to help them master the complexities of the human face. Faces can be very difficult to get done correctly and this is one of the things that I think frustrates a lot of people out of even attempting it.

With the use of a grid program you can slowly but surely master the art of recreating faces on paper and I think it is a very worthwhile tool for beginners and I encourage people to use it. Some view it as cheating and I guess to some degree it is, but if it makes you feel a bit more confident and increases your skills as an artist, I see no harm in using technology to improve your abilities.

There are a wide variety of free programs out there that you can download and from what I have noticed, the Android versions of the same program have significantly fewer annoying pop up ads that fund the "free" version of the programs. On an I-pad the ads can be a bit annoying but they are almost unnoticeable on Android versions. I wouldn't recommend using this on a phone though, it is better suited to a laptop or tablet.

Once you get your grid, you convert your drawing paper to similarly sized squares and then you can zoom in to focus on just one small portion of it at a time.

it doesn't look like much at the start but this all changes rather rapidly. I think that most people are better able to grasp an entire picture if they focus on just one small part of it at a time. I've been doing this for years and I know that I have always struggled with faces and I think that most other artists, beginners or veterans, have the same problem.

The level of detail that you can focus on when working on just one square at a time is pretty game changing and for my students as well as myself, I always feel a lot better about my end result when I use a simple tool like this. Over time the idea is that you will no longer need the app to do things like this but because faces can be so difficult to accomplish because everyone's face is different.

if you would like to get one of these grid apps there are a lot of them and they all function in the same way. Just do a search for photo grid or something similar to it. Play around with them and find out which one has ads that annoy you the least. It has been my experience that there isn't much difference between any of them.

Now onto the fact about whether or not this is "cheating." I suppose it is to a certain degree but for many of us, this is the only way that we are going to progress and although the technique is made a lot easier with modern technology, it is a technique that artists have been using basically forever.