The Grid Method for Painting

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Draw the Grid

Draw the grid on your reference and on your canvas. To see how to do this check out The Grid Method for Drawing. We use the drawing from that exercise here. 

Paint

Get the general colors in the right places. Sure you should try to get the colors and values as right as you can, but most important is the positioning. Get the darks, the lights, the shadows, and the shapes inthe right cells. Since this is my underpainting, my aim here is just to get a general roadmap that I can iterate on. Though I see some folks use a grid to paint all prima (in one go). 

Reference as inspiration

Use the reference as inspiration, not the rule. Keep what you want and get rid of the parts that you don't. In this case. I didn't like the yellow pole, so I got rid of it. We'll figure out something for that area later. 

To see me paint this flower using the grid watch this video. 

To get see what I use to draw go to my art supplies page.

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