We make two of the tools on this list, and they are at the top of it because this is our website.
So that you can judge the rest of the page fairly, we have said plainly what ours do not do, and there is a list further down of the things other tools here do better than us.
If you draw in a sketchbook and choose your own size, almost any tool on this page will serve you. The differences start to matter when you have already bought the canvas and your photo is a different shape, which it nearly always is.
The short version
Every tool here puts a grid over a photo, so the table covers what they do beyond that. Tested September 2026. The sections below describe what each one is like to use.
| Tool | Setting your canvas dimensions | Positioning the photo | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Grid Maker (ours) | Matches your photo | Not offered | Free |
| Canvas Grid Maker (ours) | Any size, cm or inches | Drag and scale | Free to use, $2 to download |
| GridMyPic | In the tool | Crop, some zoom | Free |
| drawing-grid.app | In the tool | Crop to aspect ratio | Free |
| GriDraw (web) | Not offered | Not offered | Free |
| GriDraw (desktop) | Not offered | Not offered | $19 once |
| thegridmaker.com | Separate calculator | Not offered | Free, paid tier |
| gridmaker.com | Written instructions | Not offered | Free |
| Art in Context | Not offered | Not offered | Free |
| Art Teacher Tools | Not offered | Not offered | Free |
The problem most of these do not solve
Your photo is 3:2 if it came from a camera, or 4:3 from a phone. Your canvas is whatever you bought: 30 by 40, 40 by 50, A4, square. Those shapes do not match.
So before a grid is any use, something has to give. Either you crop the photo, or you stretch it and everything comes out subtly wrong.
Most grid tools skip the decision entirely. They put a grid over the whole photo in the photo's own proportions and leave the mismatch to you. A few get partway: one lets you enter a canvas size but makes positioning awkward, another crops to an aspect ratio without letting you choose what stays, a third tells you the measurements and leaves you to imagine the result. None of them make it a simple, visual decision.
Every tool here will put a grid on a photo. The one that matters is what happens when the photo and the canvas are different shapes, and that is what the middle two columns of the table are really measuring.
Free Grid Maker
Our version of the baseline, and as capable as most on this list, if not more so. Upload a photo, set rows and columns independently from 2 to 20 each, choose the grid colour and opacity, and download the gridded image along with a printable grid guide.
The grid guide is a separate printable sheet with the grid drawn on its own and each line's position measured in centimetres or inches. You use it to rule the matching grid onto your paper or canvas by hand, without measuring and dividing yourself. That is the step people most often get wrong, which is why the numbers are on the sheet.
For most people drawing in a sketchbook, this is the whole job. You do not need anything else on this page.
the grid is locked to your photo's own proportions. If the canvas you have bought is a different shape from your photo, this will not fix that, and you will end up making that decision by eye when you transfer the drawing. That is what the next one is for.
you are working in a sketchbook, or on paper you can cut to size, and you want the grid sorted in under a minute. Open Free Grid Maker.
Canvas Grid Maker
Type your real canvas dimensions in centimetres or inches and it builds a frame at exactly that shape. Then drag and scale the photo inside the frame until the composition is right. The grid applies to what you framed, nothing is stretched, and you decide what falls outside the edge.
You get five files: colour with the grid, black and white with the grid, both again without grid lines, and the grid guide with the measurements worked out for your canvas.
Creating and previewing a grid is free, so you can see exactly what you would be getting before you decide. Downloading costs $2, which unlocks unlimited downloads for an hour, so a batch of references for a class costs the same as one. There is no account and no subscription.
the canvas is already bought and your photo is the wrong shape for it. Open Canvas Grid Maker.
you choose your own paper size anyway. Use the free one.
Features we do not have
Other tools on this list offer specialist functions that we have decided not to include. These include edge detection, posterisation, multi-page tiling, diagonal grids, movable grids, offline use, and perspective adjustment.
Our goal has been to make the process as quick and easy as possible, while still providing the core functionality that covers most artists' needs. If you think one of those features would be useful to you, the sections below will help you find the tool that does it. Otherwise, our reasoning for leaving them out is towards the bottom of this page.
GridMyPic
A capable tool, and the closest thing here to what we do. It lets you set a canvas size and place an image on it, and it comes with coordinate labels, edge detection, a focus mode that isolates a single cell, perspective adjustment, cropping and an outline tool. All of it free, funded by donations.
You can crop the image to your canvas dimensions, and there appears to be some zoom available as well, so composing a photo into a canvas is partly possible. We found it limited and hard to get a feel for, though someone who uses it regularly may well disagree.
It is a lot of tool. The perspective, crop and outline features sit apart from the gridding workflow rather than within it, which may not be intuitive for some users.
One thing worth clarifying, since it is easily mistaken for cell labelling: the coordinate system marks the boundary of the canvas, so you do not get labels on each individual cell.
you want a deep free feature set and do not mind spending time finding your way around.
you want something you can pick up straight away.
drawing-grid.app
The deepest free feature set in the category: crop with aspect ratio lock, grayscale, posterisation into tonal steps for value studies, edge detection, brightness and contrast, canvas size in centimetres or inches, grid labels, focus mode, full-screen easel mode, auto-save and fourteen languages.
The standout is multi-page PDF tiling. Tell it you want a reference 60cm wide and it splits the image across A4 sheets with margins and overlap so you can assemble a large print at home. Nothing else here does that, including us, and for anyone working large it may prove useful.
On composition, it is closer than most but not the same thing. You can set a grid to any aspect ratio and it will crop your image to fit, so you are choosing a rectangle from within the photo. What you cannot do is have a canvas the photo does not fill.
The difficulty is the interface. In our testing there was a great deal of it, and working out how to do something simple took longer than we would have liked.
you want the deepest free feature set and will invest the time, or you need to print larger than one sheet.
you want to be finished in two minutes.
GriDraw
The free web version is a simple overlay: upload a photo, put a grid on it, download.
The $19 desktop application adds grids you can drag into position, diagonal guides, labelled cells, adjustable thickness, colour and opacity, and image adjustments for brightness, contrast and saturation. Much of that grid control also exists in the free browser tools above, so the things that really set it apart are the colour and tone adjustments and the fact that it runs offline, which matters if you paint somewhere without reliable internet.
It does not do canvas sizing, and it asks you to install software for something everything else does in a browser.
you want to adjust the image's colour and tone alongside the grid, or you need to work offline, and you are happy to pay once and install an application.
thegridmaker.com
A straightforward grid overlay, surrounded by a lot of small separate calculators: aspect ratio, proportion, printable grids, canvas size, mural scaling, perspective grids.
The subscription adds extra tools, but canvas composition is not among them. It mentions composition guides, which are the rule-of-thirds sort of guide rather than anything to do with fitting a photo to a canvas. The paid additions appear to be fairly niche.
Canvas sizing exists, but on a separate calculator page rather than in the tool, so working out your canvas and gridding your photo remain two different jobs.
you want a set of small calculators alongside a grid tool.
gridmaker.com
This one does address canvas size, but not by letting you compose anything. You set your canvas dimensions and it tells you how to fit your image onto that canvas, in words and numbers. It tells rather than shows: there is no visual of your photo sitting on the canvas, so you are following instructions and trusting that the result will look the way you hoped.
you are comfortable working from written steps and want to understand the maths behind the fit.
you want to see the composition before you commit to it.
Art in Context
About as simple as it gets. Upload a photo, a grid appears, and you can change the line colour and thickness. The colour choice is white or black.
There is no control over how many rows and columns you get, no opacity, and no measurements. People in the comments have asked for square cells and grid size options; neither has arrived.
you want a grid on a photo in ten seconds and the square size does not matter.
Art Teacher Tools
Effectively the same as Art in Context's tool. Upload a photo, get a grid, download it. No canvas sizing, no composition. Straightforward and does what it says.
you want the quickest possible grid and you are not fussed about the details.
ArtTutor's grid drawing tool, and griddrawingtool.com
People still search for ArtTutor's grid drawing tool, and there are tutorials for it on YouTube and TikTok, so it is worth saying where things stand.
We have not been able to find a working copy of it, and the previous domain, griddrawingtool.com, no longer seems connected to the tool. Visiting it sends you elsewhere, so we have not linked it here. It may yet come back, or have moved somewhere we have not found.
If you arrived here after hunting for this one, that is why you could not find it.
Why we kept our tools simple
Every feature added to a tool is another decision for someone who only wants a grid on a photo. These are the ones we decided against, and the thinking behind each.
Edge detection. We could not find the case where it tells you more than the photograph already does.
Posterisation for value studies. We tried this one. Against a black and white reference it is largely redundant, and in practice the simplified bands were not as useful for reading values as we had hoped. It may still suit the way you work, and drawing-grid.app does it.
Multi-page print tiling. Most people now work from the screen and zoom in, and printer ink is not cheap. If you do print large, drawing-grid.app handles it properly and is worth using for that. Worth adding that if a reference is not sharp enough to enlarge across several sheets, the limitation is the photo rather than the grid.
Diagonal guides. A grid with the right number of cells gives you the landmarks already.
A movable grid. This one looks like a gap and is worth explaining. Tools offer a movable grid largely because they cannot move the image. If the photo is fixed in place, sliding the grid around is the only way to line the cells up with the part of the picture you care about. Canvas Grid Maker moves the image instead, which solves the same problem earlier and more directly.
Offline use. Worth having if you paint somewhere without signal, though it has rarely come up. GriDraw's desktop app covers it.
Perspective adjustment. Genuinely useful to a small number of people photographing flat artwork or buildings at an angle. Not enough of them to justify the interface it would add for everyone else.
In short
Most people, most of the time: a simple free tool is enough, and we may be biased, but we believe ours is the easiest of them to use. Free Grid Maker is as capable as the others on this list for the casual user.
The canvas is already bought and the photo is the wrong shape: Canvas Grid Maker. Several tools get partway, and none of them make it simple.
Deepest free feature set, if you will learn it: drawing-grid.app.
Printing a reference larger than one sheet: drawing-grid.app, for the multi-page tiling.
Adjusting colour and tone, or working offline: GriDraw's desktop app.
If you need something more specific, we hope this guide has pointed you in the right direction.
Every tool here was tested in September 2026, and the prices and features were correct on that date. If we have got something wrong, or a tool has changed since, tell us at support@gridyourart.com and we will fix it.
Try ours
Grid any photo free in about a minute, or set your real canvas size and compose the photo inside it.