Scaling Up with a Grid

Alphonse Mucha used the time-honored method of scaling up with a grid when he wanted to translate his reference photo to his finished cover illustration.

He drew a series of evenly-spaced horizontal and vertical lines directly over his black and white photo. He then added another set of diagonal lines to subdivide the grid in crucial areas of the face.

Presumably he redrew this grid on a separate piece of paper and then copied the content of each grid square to develop his comprehensive drawing. This separate drawing then would have been his planning step that he would have transferred down to the final painting (shown here as a black and white photo of the magazine cover).

Whether you're working from a reference photo or a hand-drawn figure study, scaling up is still one of the fastest methods, and it has a lot of advantages over eyeballing or projecting an image.

It assures that you've got the proportions and placement exactly right, and at the same time, it lets you feel more in control of the drawing, changing and improving on the reference. Mucha, a master draftsman, certainly used the photo here only as a starting point, and like Rockwell, took it in his own creative direction.

Repin's Duelling Shapes

This painting by Ilya Repin illustrates a scene in Pushkin's novel Eugene Onegin when Onegin kills Lensky in a duel. The scene takes place beside a mill in winter, and the white snow gives Repin the opportunity to silhouette the figures. Their simple poses tell the story immediately.

Repin revisits the story in this oil painting of the terrible moments after Onegin kills Lensky. Here Repin uses strong silhouettes again, but in an even more interesting way. Onegin is isolated, grappling with the weight of the deed.

His simple vertical shape is echoed by the drumbeat rhythm of the trees behind him. Lensky's form lies prostrate on the ground, an uneven, wild shape. The seconds, Guillot and Zaretsky, also form ragged silhouettes, shapewelded to each other and to the darks of the mill behind them.


Keep an eye on next month's (Dec/Jan) issue of International Artist magazine, which will have an article that I wrote for them on silhouettes, based on material in Imaginative Realism.

Previously on GJ: Silhouette, Part 1 and Part 2.

Clothespins and Crabb

One evidence of the true artist is the transformation of ordinary things into little fragments of beauty.

David Starrett paints each of his wooden clothespins with a different design, each a variation of his mascot, the fox.

A left-handed painter, he thinks big. He came up with this prototype for a large oil palette, though he works more often in watercolor.

He taught for many years in the Los Angeles area at Otis, Valley College, and Art Center.

When he visited in 1990, he posed for Lee Crabb, the malcontent and schemer in Dinotopia: a Land Apart from Time. But in truth he has a heart of gold.

Previously: The Real Lee Crabb

Greek Edition of Dinotopia

The Greek edition of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara has just been published.

Previous post on the Romanian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, and Hungarian editions.