Grid tools
A grid maker that overlays an evenly spaced drawing grid on a reference image, so it can be copied or scaled one square at a time. Export as PNG.
Grid maker, drawing grid, grid art — same tool, different names
People land here searching for slightly different phrases that point at the same thing. A grid maker is the tool itself. A drawing grid is what it produces — the lines laid over your reference. Grid art and a grid drawing tool both describe the technique: breaking an image into equal squares so a copy can be built one cell at a time instead of judged freehand across the whole picture. This page covers all of it with one tool rather than five near-identical pages repeating the same explanation with the words shuffled.
How the grid lines are placed
The image is measured in pixels the moment it loads, and the column and row counts divide that width and height independently, so a portrait-oriented photo does not have to end up with square cells. Each line is computed from the image edge rather than by stepping forward from the previous line, which is what keeps a 7-column grid evenly spaced instead of drifting by a fraction of a pixel toward the far edge.
The live preview draws those lines with CSS, not a canvas redraw, so changing the column count, the row count, the colour, the width or the opacity costs nothing while you are still deciding what you want. Only pressing Export touches a canvas: the image is drawn once at a working resolution and the same grid is drawn on top of it, then the whole thing is read back out as one PNG.
What a grid maker cannot do
- A very large photo is downscaled before it reaches the export canvas, so the PNG you get is not always at the source file's full resolution.
- The export is one flattened image. There is no layered file to reopen later — change the settings and export again if you want a different grid on the same photo.
- Only an evenly spaced grid. A perspective grid that follows vanishing points in a scene is a different tool solving a different problem.
