Enlarging an existing drawing
I chose a ceramic coffee mug for this task, and drew a pencil thumbnail sketch of it into a square of 10 cm on a A5 sheet of paper. The mug had some colours on it, but I did not want to include them in the thumbnail, I just focused on the forms.
For the grid, I prepared a transparent document sleeve, which I cut open and drew a 2×2 cm grid with permanent marker on it. I placed this on top of the sketch but adjusted the position so that I wouldn’t be exactly copy the 10×10 cm square, but rather a 8×10 cm rectangle which marked the boundaries of the object.
The instructions were a bit confusing, they indicated to enlarge from 2 to 20 cm squares on an A4 paper sheet, which obviously wouldn’t work out. I would have needed a 80 x 100cm sheet of paper for my mug. I chose an A3 sketchbook instead and enlarged to 6×6 cm squares. I first drew the base 4×5 squares, this had the size of 24 x 30 cm. Then I worked from upper left to lower right square, but marking the cutting points with the grid lines for several squares before drawing the mug’s lines through these points.
The result wasn’t very convincing. It appeared to be an enlargement of small errors in the thumbnail sketch to large errors in the resulting image. If I had to do it for an image where exact reproduction was important, I think I would use a finer grid which reduces the amount of estimation at grid intersections. And of course, the small image would need to be correct in its proportions in the first place, otherwise the technique only reproduces errors and makes them even more visible.
Enlarging a simple flat image
I thought quite a long time about this exercise, and could not decide on anything I would like to draw in small for the sake of enlarging it. It would have been an opportunity to draw just something that I enjoyed to draw, but the prospect of having to draw a sketch for reproduction on a grid background for the final drawing completely put me off.
As an alternative, I thought about enlarging this photograph of natural ice from A4 and make an A2 drawing from it, but after some initial attempts to outline the main traits of the image it turned out to be too complex for a simple technical exercise. I will skip the enlargement exercise for now because I cannot relate to it in a meaningful way. Maybe I’ll get back to it at a later time when I have a more positive idea how I could execute the task.