Grid Maker for Drawing

You want to draw from a photo, and freehand the proportions keep drifting: the eyes too close, the jaw too long. A grid breaks the job into small squares you copy one at a time. Below: choosing that grid, scaling it to paper, and splitting a photo into Instagram tiles posted in the right order.

How the grid method works

Rule the same number of squares on your paper as the grid has on the photo, then copy one square at a time. Inside a single square you stop seeing "an eye" and see a few lines and patches of tone crossing the square's sides at particular points. Copying those crossing points is far easier than judging a whole face, and a small error stays inside one square instead of spreading.

The squares on the paper can be larger or smaller than the ones on the photo, and that difference is how the drawing is scaled. The grid keeps its shape, so the proportions do too.

A workable order: rule the grid lightly, mark where the main outlines cross each grid line, join the marks, then add detail and shading square by square.

Square cells or rows and columns

In this guide, as in the tool's result, a grid is written across × down. With rows and columns, cell width = photo width ÷ columns and cell height = photo height ÷ rows. The cells come out square only when columns ÷ rows equals the photo's width ÷ height. On a 4,000 × 3,000 photo, which is 4:3, a 4 × 4 grid gives oblong cells of 1,000 × 750 pixels; 8 columns by 6 rows, or 12 by 9, gives squares. The ratio calculator reduces a pixel size to its ratio.

Square cells start from the top-left corner, as you would rule paper, so whatever does not divide evenly ends up in the last row or column. The tool says which, and how wide the part square is. Rule the same part square on your paper.

Choosing a square size

More squares mean shorter distances between reference points and a closer copy, but more ruling. Larger squares suit a simple subject or a first attempt; a face benefits from smaller ones.

The tool starts at square = short side ÷ 8, rounded to a whole pixel. On a 4,000 × 3,000 photo that is 375 pixels: 11 squares across and 8 down, the last column only 250 pixels wide, because 4,000 is not a multiple of 375.

A better square size divides the photo's width and height into whole squares and gives a paper square you can measure easily. On the same photo, 500 pixels gives exactly 8 × 6 squares and no part squares.

Scaling the grid to your paper

Two formulas cover it:

• square on paper = square in pixels × drawing width ÷ photo width
• drawing height = photo height × drawing width ÷ photo width

Type the drawing width in centimetres and the tool works out both, and how many squares to rule.

The first row: 500 × 20 ÷ 4,000 = 2.5 cm per square, and 3,000 × 20 ÷ 4,000 = 15 cm tall. The second shows why the default is not always friendly: 1.875 cm is hard to rule.

You can also work back from the paper. For 2.5 cm squares on a drawing 30 cm wide you need 30 ÷ 2.5 = 12 squares across, so each square would be 4,000 ÷ 12 = 333.33… pixels. No whole number of pixels gives exactly 12, so switch to rows and columns instead: 12 columns by 9 rows matches 4:3, gives square cells of 2.5 cm, and makes a drawing 22.5 cm tall.

You choose only the width; the photo's shape fixes the height. If it comes out too tall for your paper, choose a narrower drawing.

Diagonals, labels and greyscale

Diagonals cross each square corner to corner, adding reference lines that help with angles and with placing the eyes, nose and mouth. All lines are drawn as one shape, so crossings are no darker than the lines at partial opacity. In a part square at the edge, the diagonals are those of a full square cut off by the photo's edge, so they do not run into the part square's own corners; rule them the same way on paper.

Labels name each square spreadsheet-style, column letter then row number: A1 top left, B1 beside it, AA after Z. Label your paper the same way and every square's partner is easy to find. Labels are left off when squares are under 28 pixels or there are more than 2,500 of them, and the tool says so. With square cells on a 4,000 × 3,000 photo, the smallest labelled square is 70 pixels, a grid of 58 × 43 = 2,494; at 69 pixels it would be 58 × 44 = 2,552.

Greyscale removes colour so you can judge light and shade alone. The tool uses the Rec. 601 weights, grey = 0.299 × red + 0.587 × green + 0.114 × blue. On a 0 to 255 scale, pure red becomes 76, pure green 150 and pure blue 29: three equally strong colours are three very different tones in pencil.

Line colour, weight and the download

Choose a line colour that stands out: black on a pale photo, white or yellow on a dark one. Opacity runs from 10% to 100%, starting at 80%, so the photo shows through. Thickness runs from 1 to 30 photo pixels and starts at round(long side ÷ 700), kept between 1 and 12, which is 6 pixels on a photo 4,000 pixels long.

The download is made at the photo's own pixel size, up to 4,000 pixels on the long side. JPG is the default, because a PNG of a detailed photo is large and slow to make. In the builder's tests a detailed 4,000 × 3,000 PNG was about 14 MB and took about 2.2 seconds to encode; the JPG took about 0.4 to 0.75 seconds. PNG is lossless, so it suits the times when crisp lines matter more than file size.

Splitting a photo into Instagram tiles

Tile mode cuts one photo into pieces meant to sit side by side on an Instagram profile. Presets are 3 × 1, 3 × 2 and 3 × 3 (across × down), with custom layouts up to 10 × 10. Tiles can be square, 4:5 portrait, or keep the photo's shape. For square and 4:5 tiles the tool takes the largest centred part of the photo that has the whole mosaic's shape (three squares across and three down make a square; three across and one down, a 3:1 strip), and the preview dims what is trimmed.

For a 4,000 × 3,000 photo:

The crop is always centred, with no control to move it, so check in the preview that the part you care about survives. Splitting a 4:5 portrait photo 3 × 2 into squares trims 47% of it.

Instagram's Help Centre says it uploads feed photos at up to 1,080 pixels wide, sizing wider ones down to that, and advises uploading at least 1,080 pixels wide. Square 3 × 3 tiles that wide need a photo at least 3 × 1,080 = 3,240 pixels on its short side. This tool works on photos at up to 4,000 pixels on the long side, so a 4:3 photo is at most 4,000 × 3,000 here and its 3 × 3 square tiles come out at 1,000 pixels, a little under that; a square photo can reach 4,000 × 4,000, giving tiles of about 1,333. The same page says a photo between 320 and 1,080 pixels wide, in a supported shape, is kept at its own resolution.

For a single profile picture instead, the WhatsApp DP Size Maker fits a whole photo into a square.

Which tile shapes Instagram takes

With the photo's shape kept, the tool warns when a tile is taller than 3:4 or wider than 1.91:1, the range in Instagram's current English Help Centre article, which says a photo outside it is cropped to a supported shape. A 3 × 1 split of a 4,000 × 3,000 photo gives tiles of about 1,333 × 3,000, which is 0.44:1 and well outside. Square and 4:5 tiles never trigger the warning. The sources disagree about the tall limit:

The tool's warning follows the current English page's 3:4 limit, so a 3:4 tile, such as a 3,000 × 4,000 portrait cut 3 × 3 with its shape kept, is not flagged, although it would fall outside the older 4:5 range. If you want tiles inside every version of the range, choose square or 4:5 tiles.

The profile grid is less settled. In January 2025 Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, wrote that a new tall grid had launched on the profile, without giving a ratio or a pixel size. No official Instagram or Meta source found for this guide gives a grid tile size, so seams may not meet exactly in the grid view.

Posting the tiles in the right order

The tool assumes a grid three posts wide, as the app displays it, with the newest post top left; no official Instagram statement of the column count was found for this guide. So the bottom-right piece goes up first and the top-left piece last, right to left along each row from the bottom. For a 3 × 3 split:

Post tile 1 first and the highest number last, one after another with nothing in between. The ZIP's file names start from your photo's own name and sort into posting order: for photo.jpg cut 3 × 3 they run from photo-01-row3-col3.jpg to photo-09-row1-col1.jpg, with a posting-order.txt note alongside.

Pinned posts stay at the start of the grid and push every tile along, so unpin them first. If a tile goes up out of place, Instagram's @creators account announced a "Reorder your grid" feature for moving posts around the profile grid on 8 June 2026, as that week's update; it gave no start date and did not say every account has it.

What this tool assumes

• Photos are worked on at up to 4,000 pixels on the long side; larger ones are scaled down first, and downloads use that size.
• The drawing width is used only to work out square sizes and height. The download is the photo with lines, not a page sized for printing.
• The preview is a copy of the photo at most 1,200 pixels on its long side, and it draws lines at least one of its own pixels wide, so very thin lines on a large photo look slightly heavier there than in the download.
• Labels use the device's system font, so they vary slightly between devices.
• Posting order assumes a newest-first grid three posts wide with no pinned posts. Seams meeting in the grid view is not promised.
• The tool has no HEIC decoder of its own. An iPhone HEIC photo opens only if your browser can open it; otherwise the tool says so, and a JPEG copy works instead.
• Nothing is uploaded. Downloads are new files drawn in your browser, so the original's location and camera metadata are not carried over.