Chapter 5 | ENLARGING AN IMAGE

Sometimes you want to enlarge an image, maybe your own drawing or a comic strip. A handy method that does not require any equipment is the following:

Step 1: Draw over your example a grid with squares of, for example, 1 x 1 cm (see image). In the example, the grid consists of 10 rows of 10 squares each.

Step 2: Suppose you want to make this drawing twice as large, then you first draw (with a ruler!) a frame with 10 rows of 10 squares, in this case however with squares of 2 x 2 cm each. Suppose you want to enlarge the drawing four times, then each square must be 4 x 4 cm. and so on. This way you can easily enlarge the original because you can see what has been drawn per square.

Exercise: Choose a cartoon or other image and try to enlarge it two or four times.

Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) turned tiny comic strip images into large paintings, including the speech bubbles. This is how the world of comics entered the museum. He meticulously enlarged the black outlines and even the grid of printed colors into painted dots.

Nowadays, artists often use projectors/beamers for enlargements, but it is nice to be able to do this at home without any additional equipment.