Overlay geometry
Canvas drawing routines for Loomis, perspective, rule of thirds, golden ratio, root rectangles, sacred geometry, design templates, and print grids.
Colophon · The founder
Founder, lead developer, and author of the Grid Maker Pro catalogue.
Sarah Chen builds drawing-grid tools for real studio work.
Grid Maker Pro began as a practical fix for reference setup: fewer rulers, faster proportional checks, and a browser workflow that does not upload private commission images. Sarah writes the overlay catalogue, ships the tool, and maintains the educational guides behind it.
Founder and lead developer Grid Maker Pro
82overlays implemented, tested, and documented.
25+years of figurative drawing and composition practice.
0required image uploads in the core browser workflow.
Allpillar guides authored or reviewed against the methodology.
§ I · Why she built it
A studio problem became a browser product.
I trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BA Fine Arts) before spending the better part of two decades drawing, painting, and teaching figurative work in studios, ateliers, and online programmes. The bulk of my hands-on practice has been portraiture - Loomis, Reilly, Bargue - but the work that pushed me toward grid tools was landscape and architectural drawing, where proportional accuracy at scale matters more than expressive freedom.
Across that practice I accumulated a folder of drafting tools: printed isometric paper, photocopied Bargue plates, a Lucy projector, hand-drawn radial grids for mandalas, and the back of a paper plate as an emergency square grid when nothing else was available. Each tool solved one specific problem. None of them lived in the same place.
Grid Maker Pro is what I wished existed: every drawing grid I have needed in one browser tool, free to use, deep enough to handle a Loomis head sketch and a quilt-block layout in the same session.
§ II · What she owns
The product, the geometry, and the writing are connected.
Product workflow
Upload locally, align overlays, adjust appearance, export the working reference, and avoid sending commission images to a server.
Writing and citations
Pillar guides connect studio use to sources: Loomis, Hambidge, Bouleau, Durer, Alberti, Bringhurst, platform specs, and contested art-history claims.
Privacy model
The tool stays useful for artists because reference images stay in the browser. The privacy choice is product design, not policy copy added later.
§ III · Studio workflow
The catalogue widened from adjacent real needs.
The first problem was proportion.
Portrait and landscape references needed faster alignment than hand-built construction grids could provide.
The early version centered on working overlays.
Square grid, thirds, golden ratio, Loomis-style head construction, and export came before any broad content catalogue.
The system grew around actual requests.
Photography, web design grids, sacred geometry, architecture, craft templates, and printable sheets all came from real use cases.
§ IV · Selected writing
Guides written for people using overlays on real work.
5,050 words
4,080 words
3,110 words
The Loomis Method
The 13-step head construction for front, profile, three-quarter, up-tilt, and down-tilt reference work.
Dynamic Symmetry guide
Hambidge root rectangles, Bouleau armature, and the practical limits of historical claims around the system.
Grid vs Projector vs Tracing
A direct comparison of image-transfer methods for artists choosing the right workflow for a specific job.
Coda · Corrections & contact
Specific feedback makes the tool better.
For corrections, citation requests, or feedback on a specific overlay: sarah@gridmakerpro.com. For feature requests and bug reports, use the contact page. For the broader company story, read About Grid Maker Pro.