Adventures in Grid Painting!

Do you remember that exercise art teachers would have you do in order to teach you how to recreate an image? You'd draw a grid over the reference, and then work on getting the proportions right in each square. It allows you to focus on details instead of looking at the picture as a whole. Well, I just did exactly that! 

The idea started because of general quarantine boredom. Luckily, I live in a house with four other people, and we all get along really well. When thinking of activities to do while cooped up inside, I suggested doing our own paint-and-sip night—but with a twist! Instead of all working on the same painting, or just doing our own thing, instead we'd make a painting together! Or more accurately, we would each make a separate painting that combine into a larger one.

Picking a painting to reproduce was easy enough; no one had a very strong preference. We wanted a painting that had something relatively fun/interesting to paint no matter which section you happened to be assigned. We also vetoed any paintings with people in them (people are hard). In the end, I found this, which was cropped for the sake of being able to divide it into squares:

Cheerful, lots of colors, and stylized enough to distract from our lack of skill :P With the five of us roommates, plus my roommate's girlfriend, we each got two squares to work on. They were picked so that each pair of squares couldn't be adjacent to one another (we wanted the painting styles to be sufficiently mixed together).

I was half expecting people to just phone it in, but was pleasantly surprised by how much care was put in to each section. After one painting session, not everyone was finished, but it was a lot of fun to have something to come back to and work on together each day after work.

The end result was so much better than I could have hoped for:

Look how cute it turned out! Obviously, the places where one painting ends and another begins don't exactly line up, but I think that adds to its overall charm. Plus it will be a great conversation starter when we are able to finally have guests over. Can you guess which ones I made...? Oh my gosh, you're right! How did you know?! Kidding. I made the second one in the top row, plus the one in the bottom left corner. Not too shabby, right?

Anywho, my takeaway is that this was a ton of fun, and I 100% recommend that you try this with your friends.