Grid maker › About

About this grid maker

A free online grid maker built around one job: putting a grid you can actually draw from onto your reference photo.

Why this exists

The grid method is centuries old and needs no software at all — a ruler and a printed photo will do. But the fiddly part has always been the setup: ruling lines over a print, working out how many squares, redoing it when the proportions come out wrong. That is a job a browser can do in a second, so Grid Maker does it.

The aim was a tool that loads fast, works on a phone, and gives you a sheet you can actually print and use — rather than one that asks you to register, watermarks the output, or holds the useful settings behind a subscription.

What it does

• Puts an adjustable, labelled grid over any photo you load
• Lets you set rows, columns, line colour, thickness, opacity and label style
• Adds diagonal guides and composition overlays for placement
• Converts the reference to sketch, line art, black and white, vintage or detected edges
• Exports a print-ready sheet at A2 to A5, Letter, Legal or a custom size in millimetres
• Downloads as PNG or JPG at up to 600 DPI, with no watermark

What happens to your images

Nothing leaves your device. The photo you choose is read by your browser and drawn onto a canvas locally — there is no upload step, no server copy, and no account attached to it. That is not a policy promise so much as a design decision: the code has nowhere to send an image even if it wanted to. Close the tab and it is gone.

The practical upside is that the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded, and that you can use reference photos of family, clients or commissions without wondering where they ended up.

Who it is for

Graphite and coloured-pencil artists working from photographs, portrait and pet-portrait painters, muralists and sign painters scaling designs up, art students learning proportion, and teachers who need a class set of gridded references in a hurry.

How it is paid for

The site carries advertising, which is what keeps the tool free and unrestricted for everyone. There is no paid tier and no feature held back.

Get in touch

Bug reports, feature requests and corrections to the guides are all welcome — the contact page has the details.