In this video we're going to be taking a look at the grid system and I'm going to be using this reference of a tiger for this project. Now what I've done here is I printed out a copy of my reference photo so that I can draw the grid right on the photo itself and I'm going to start here using my ruler and a regular hb mechanical pencil in this case. I actually like using an f pencil or the general layout pencil but in this case I'm just going to use the mechanical pencil and starting from left to right what I want to do is put a mark every one inch starting from the left. So as you can see here that I have just a little mark every one inch across the top here and then when I get to the end I just have a little bit left which is fine and I do need to make sure that when I put the marks at the bottom of the page that I'm going to duplicate that but now I'm going to work on the left side and again starting from the beginning of an inch and the actual photo itself I'm going to start drawing one inch marks all the way across from left to right. Okay taking note on which end of the paper has the smaller than one inch I want to make sure that I duplicate it on the other side of the photo so I don't end up with the partial inch on one end and the on the opposite side is on the other end that could really make for some very strange lines so in this case here I'm going to go ahead and start drawing the one inch lines on the other side starting here from the right and I'm going to work my way over to the left. Okay so here on the left side of I have the smallest part which is going to match the smallest part on the opposite side so you want to make sure that and they're the big one inch equal one inch sizes all from right to left here so see it just make sure that it matches so that when you're going to draw your lines that they're going to be a distance to part correctly. As you can see the small part is on the right side on the top so I want to make sure that when I do it on the bottom the small part will be on the right side as well and so again I'm going to start adding in my one inch lines. Okay and now have my one inch dots on the bottom there with the left over on the right end and the left over on the right end on the top so that's all lining up nicely. Okay now it's time to draw the actual grid and I'm going to connect the dot from the top to the dot on the bottom for each one. I've decided to bring out the big guns so I'm going to use my very long aluminum ruler for this task. Okay we'll take a close up look here and you can see that I've drawn a vertical line from top to bottom all the way down. Now in some places I noticed it's a little hard to see the line and since this is just a copy that I printed out and it's not my main reference I think that I'm going to need something that's going to show up a little bit better and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to ditch the mechanical pencil and I'm going to find one of my gel pins and find one that's going to actually show up better. I finally settled on a light cyan gel pen and it seemed to show up a little bit better than the graphite pencil for some of the really dark areas around the fur. Okay now that these vertical lines look pretty good and I can see them and they're spaced out really nice one inch apart. I am now going to start connecting the other side of the grid here. And here is the completed grid. You can see that we have one inch squares all the way across and we can see it through the dark and light areas of the reference photo and that's what I wanted to achieve. For this project I'm going to be using Arches watercolour hot pressed 140 pounds and I'm going to use the smooth side as opposed to the more textured side. Now what I want to do here is put the reference photo that has the grid drawn on it onto my drawing paper and get it centered exactly where I want it to be considering framing or just having a nice even border around the paper whatever the case may be. You just align it right where you want to do the actual drawing and then use the grid that is on your reference photo that you've already drawn to place the marks on your drawing paper so that you will be able to draw an exact grid on your drawing paper. Now it's time to connect the marks to draw the grid on the drawing paper. Now the grid is complete on the drawing paper. I want to verify the grid on the reference photo to the grid on the drawing paper to make sure that I have the drawing paper in the correct position instead of upside down because remember that at the end of the grid there is only a sliver of an inch rather than the whole inch so I want to make sure that it matches the drawing paper and this is going to end part one. In part two we will start to draw the details onto the drawing paper using this grid method.