How To: Grid Overlay on an Existing Painting using Photoshop

Introduction

Dynamic Symmetry grids are available from the website, Canon of Design: https://www.ipoxstudios.com/canon-of-design-essentials/. I recently purchased an $11.99 package with literally hundreds of grids for PHI and many ROOT rectangles and popular camera or film sizes. Some of the grids have black lines as in these examples and some white lines. Our most popular painting canvases don't necessarily have grids that fit with the same proportion, but some are quite close.  
Some examples (you may select any of these for download to your computer. These inserted images are smaller than the original but useful I think; they don't need much resolution).  Note that the package I downloaded also has some very useful camera-sized grids.  The website owner has many free posts on using these grids and has some free downloads also.


eg: 6x8, 9x12, 12x16, 18x24

Golden Rectangle

Golden Rectangle



Close to 5x7 since 7/5 = 1.4 and Root 2 = 1.414..



eg: close to 11x14 since 14/11 = 1.272727....

Let's see if I can find one more: 8x10. or 4x5. It was in an older packet.
4x5 or 8x10, 16x20

The older package also had 14-line grids; eg, the Harmonic Armature.  It's relatively easy to create one of these armatures though, using an iMac's Preview for example. Then since the armature doesn't rely upon perpendiculars or rebated squares, we can stretch it to any proportion:
8x10 but can be stretched to any proportion

Tip: I created some examples combining the grids. 1. Open one grid with Photoshop. 2. Drag second grid over the first (same proportions). 2. Then select the "Multiply" (black on white) or "Screen" (white on black) option. 3. Screen capture the combination for a new combined grid. 4. Use the process below to apply this new grid to your desired painting image.




Construction

1.Select an existing painting to be overlaid with a grid and drag it to Photoshop (or open it with Photoshop).



2. Find the desired "PNG" grid for the overlay on your painting. (See other posts for instructions on the creation of this particular hand-made grid),

3. Drag it over your painting image in Photoshop. 



Sometimes the painting image itself has a color profile that doesn't allow an overlay. In this case do a Screen shot of the painting jpeg image (see below for instructions) to covert it to a png without the color profile and start over.

4. Stretch the overlay to fit the painting by grabbing the corners and dragging to the image corners.





5. Convert it to transparent by changing the setting in the layer from "normal" to 'multiply'.  If the overlay is black with white or light lines, use the setting "screen".  





6. Save the resulting image to a psd file. Give it an appropriate revised title to include the grid style. I skip this save step and instead do a screen capture of the image with the overlay to be used for analysis or for insertion into a blog or website post.



Sunflowers Everywhere 10x16.18 with DS Grid Plus and Spiral

(The 'Plus' in this case refers to the rebated squares added to the Dynamic Symmetry -DS- grid.)

Conversion to a 'png'

A photo may need to be converted to a 'png' for photoshop, taking a screen shot of the image:

  1. CMD/Shift/4 and 
  2. use your mouse to drag a rectangle around the image
  3. then click with your mouse
  4. a 'png' screen shot will appear on your desktop. 
There are other ways to do a screenshot; this is the way I do it.






Popular posts from this blog

Color Wheel Revisited

Image
We will be using the triadic color wheel from the Color Wheel Company to illustrate color relationships. a good resource is the book, Color is Everything, by Dan Bartges, a book with thorough descriptions of this tool (I will have it in the workshop for you to peruse).  Triadic Color Wheel from the Color Wheel Company: Study of the Triadic Color Wheel. The color wheel provides 12 hues around the circle on each side  On the one side we can see the effects of mixing red, yellow and blue and white and black with each of the 12 hues by rotating the wheel. This side also has a value scale that can be matched up with each of the hues to identify the value of each hue. The second side shows the tint, tone and shade for each of the hues. Directions are provided for determining analogous colors, complementaries , split complements, triads and tetrads. We will be discussing these at length. For a preliminary website link with definitions see:  http://www.tige...
Read more

(extra) Color Mixing on the web with online Apps with RGB and CMYK

Image
May begin color mixing by studying color pickers provided by on-line tools. These are based on the RGB color wheel for web development, with its additive nature.   So first, an explanation of the RGB colors on the color wheel. We will see the representation of the R, G, B hues as 'hexadecimal'; e.g., red is #FF0000, where the FF masks the red perfectly and 00 masks the green and blue perfectly, but you will notice that the third hue in these tertiaries are masked with 7F. Binary numbers are 0's and 1's; 7 = 0111 in binary; F = 1111 in binary, so we see 0, 7 and F here. White would be FFFFF a perfect mix of R, G and B, while Black is 000000, a complete absence of an R, G or B. Yellow, magenta and cyan are complements of blue, green and red in this scheme.  In fact the hexadecimal notation for these complements has '1's in place of '0' and vice versa for the primaries and secondaries.  The tertiaries are aligned somewhat differently., with 7F m...
Read more

(extra) Color Palette Examples

Image
==================================== Limited palette of Don Finkeldei: www.finkeldeistudio.com. I have studied with Don and used his method extensively. He has many articles on the topic that are well worth reading and re-reading. His color charts, are quite useful and found in a new article on the website. His color palette consists of the Utrecht Artist Oils: cadmium yellow light, cadmium red light, ultramarine blue plus white, as well as alizarin crimson and viridian for transparent darks and sometimes the convenience color, cadmium orange.  He creates a few values of greys from a dark formed by the yellow, red and blue to be used in the mixing.  He also uses his AC/V transparent dark for accents. He pre-mixes his colors on the palette. ==================================== String Palette: I would like to include some material here on the palette of strings based on the Munsell theory, that formed my very first palette for oil painting. My instructor was the ar...
Read more