The maker artist & founder

Sujith Puthran

Grid Maker Pro is built by a working artist, not a software company. That's not a slogan — it's the reason the tools are shaped the way they are.

Practice Charcoal, watercolour and oil — figurative and portrait work, self-taught
Working since First gallery group show in 2009; 15+ years at the easel
From Mulky, Udupi (Karnataka), born 1990 — now based in Mumbai, India
Elsewhere sujithputhran.com · @sujithputhranartist

Sujith Puthran has spent more than 15 years as a practising artist. Born in the coastal village of Mulky in Karnataka's Udupi district, raised in Moloor and now working from Mumbai, he taught himself to draw and paint without a formal art education — no art school, no atelier — first from observation, then from the classical construction methods this site documents: the grid method, proportion systems, the geometry under a composition. The tools here exist because he needed them first.

The gallery work is organised as six closed series rather than as single pictures: Bharatanatyam dancers, sadhus, the Varanasi ghats, Rajasthan, the Buddha, and mother and child. The medium follows the image — charcoal for the dancers, where the weight and velocity of a figure is carved out of black; transparent washes or the slow depth of oil where the subject asks for them. The full catalogue of originals, with the studio journal and commission process, lives on his own site at sujithputhran.com.

The grids exist because a real artist needed them first — not because a company guessed at what artists want.

The work

His own practice is rooted in charcoal on paper — portraits and figurative work where the likeness has to survive close inspection. The long-running Bharatanatyam series, drawn from the classical Indian dance form, is the clearest example: gesture, drapery, and anatomy held together by exactly the proportion scaffolding the overlay catalogue teaches. Galleries that carry his drawings describe the work as introspective realism — "within the apparent calm and stillness lie hidden, complex psychological elements" is how ArtZolo puts it. Alongside gallery work he has completed over 200 commissioned portraits, the kind of deadline drawing where a reliable grid is not a nicety but the difference between one sitting and three.

Charcoal drawing from Sujith Puthran's Bharatanatyam series — a classical Indian dancer in mid-gesture — From the *Bharatanatyam* series — charcoal on paper. The proportion and gesture work in drawings like this is where the overlay catalogue was pressure-tested.

Shown and collected

The career is verifiable, and most of it happened before Grid Maker Pro existed:

Group exhibitions at Vadehra Art Gallery (2009), Kalaneri Art Gallery, Jaipur (2010), and Chitram Art Gallery, Kochi (2012)
A solo exhibition in Berlin at Atelier Sabine Neibhur (2013), shown through the TuttoArte platform
Group showing at the Lugano Innovation Lab, Bolta Palace, Switzerland (2014), as part of YICCA
Winner of the YICCA International Contest of Contemporary Art — both the open vote and the winter edition — first place in Tallenge International Art Contest No. 46 (2014), and eight awards from The Wall Art Magazine between December 2012 and October 2013
Work held in private and corporate collections in India and the United States, including GE Capital (California) and Ramada Plaza Palm Grove
More than 200 commissioned portraits completed for clients internationally

Art is not what I do, it is how I breathe.

Why Grid Maker Pro exists

Grid Maker Pro started the way most useful tools do: from a problem at the easel. He needed accurate proportions on a reference, the existing tools offered two or three basic grids, and so he built the overlay he actually wanted to draw with. That one overlay became 82 — golden ratio, the Loomis head, dynamic symmetry, perspective, sacred geometry — the full composition vocabulary a serious artist reaches for, free in the browser.

Sujith Puthran's hand at work on a watercolour painting of a snake charmer, brush mid-stroke — Work in progress at the easel — a watercolour under Sujith's brush. Every overlay in the catalogue is tested against work like this before it ships.

Why an app, when the web tool is free

The free web tool does everything a browser can: stack overlays on a reference, transform them, export print-ready. It stays free forever. But a browser physically cannot point a camera at your paper and hold a reference over it. That's the one thing the AR app adds — tracing a photo straight onto real paper, canvas, or a wall — and it's the honest reason the app is a separate, paid product. We're adding a new capability, never paywalling the free one.

The same standard runs through both: the app ships all 82 grids, processes your reference on the device, and lets you trace your own photo for free every month — because locking your own picture behind a paywall is the single most common complaint artists have with the apps already on the store. Sujith builds the tool he'd want to open, then ships it.

Elsewhere

His own studio site — the six collections, the journal, and commission enquiries — is sujithputhran.com. You can also find the work on Instagram at @sujithputhranartist, on Facebook, and in the galleries that carry his drawings — ArtZolo and Fine Art America. For the story of how Grid Maker Pro grew from one overlay to a full catalogue, see the about page, or read the methodology behind how the overlays are built and sourced.