Scaling Up an Image the Easy Way

Have you ever tried to scale up an image, only to be befuddled by messy calculations? Well, here's an easier way. No fractions, no division -- all you need to know is how to multiply. Supplies needed: a ruler.

Many of us plein air painters like to take our small field sketches and scale them up into larger, studio paintings. The process involves gridding the original sketch and also the final painting surface. The grids, the one on the sketch and the one on the final surface, need to have the same proportions and the same number of columns and rows. Trying to calculate out the dimensions can be a real headache! This method makes things easy.