How do proportional dividers work

Among tools used in drawing there should be a proportional divider. Sooner or later if you are serious about painting, drawing, or sculpturing you will come to a point you will need to check your proportions, distances, or scaling.

You can do all that with a proportional divider and gain some extra benefits. This is a small, portable tool that allows you to easily measure and scale objects. Many artists especially those that are doing portraits, use grids for correct proportions. And that is ok, but it is very messy, and you can easily destroy your paper with an eraser. Erasing all of those grids from the paper is very destructive, and everybody knows that the artist avoids using erasers.

If you are a grid lover which also can perfectly be usable with a proportional divider I have a bonus tip for you. Make the process of creating grids easier with a free tool, just upload your image and get a grid by your preferences. Every portrait starts with good outlines, and this is the foundation of every portrait.

Maurice Kidjel — is the inventor of the proportional divider, his research in proportions make him invent a divider. So why mess up on the beginning with face sketches or the structure of the painting, and lose your time for nothing. Use a proportional divider and make your time more productive.

With a proportional scale, you can enlarge or reduce your drawing, painting, sculpting. Some artists force them-self not to use proportion dividers because they say that is cheating and it is not cheating.

But for many artists especially for beginners, this is a gamechanger. It will help them to enter the art world with less stress. It will improve your observation skills, and then when you learn to observe you will do it with a free hand.

If you know how divider works and you wish to skip to the best divider on the market scroll down for the best dividers on market.

On the market there are many different dividers, we will get to them later. What you should know is that they all work the same, they have the same job. The proportional divider is used as a helping tool for drawing or painting with reference photos and from real life. If you changed pin position then you are transferring a new scale, smaller or larger. Also, you get a distance where you should make points on the paper. Once your drawing or painting is built up you can pick more reference points to check proportions on artwork.

That is super useful if you have many details. Today you can find mostly three types of material, plastic, wood, and metal. Which one you will choose is a personal preference. Metal proportional dividers are done to last for a long time, higher quality is normal with them. Be aware that you will have much more weight in your hand, but also much more stability. Sharp tips can also damage your paper, you must give extra precautions in this part. It is unlocked by pulling out a button on the right side of the case.

It is also marked: The case is marked on the bottom: Made in Germany. Tacro is a manufacturer of drawing instruments apparently established in the 20th century. According to online auction records, it marked its products as made in West Germany from about to Thus, this object probably dates to the s or s.

As of , Tacro continues to make these proportional dividers. Kidjel Ratio Cali-Pro Proportional Dividers Description This metal instrument has two long arms and two short arms, all colored gold and arranged as in a pantograph.

Needle points are bolted to both ends of the long arms. The arms are fixed at a desired distance with a thumbscrew on a central rod. Unlike a pantograph or standard proportional dividers, the instrument is not marked so that it may be set for a variety of proportional relationships and thus be used to create scale drawings at a variety of sizes.

Instead, the inventor, Honolulu portrait artist Maurice Kidjel — , designed the instrument so that it always preserved a ratio of 5. To create drawings in this "universal ratio," the user set the long needles at the width of the large part of the drawing and then turned the dividers over to use the short needles to make a small part of the drawing in proportion to the large part of the drawing. Cardboard and yellow foam inside the box provided support and cushioning to the dividers and related documentation.

Kidjel and his business partner, Kenneth W. According to the advertising flyer received with the object MA. His solutions, constructed with a compass and straight edge, appeared in the textbook distributed with the Cali-Pro MA.

His work depended on a false definition of pi and thus is not mathematically valid. Nonetheless, Daniel Inouye read a tribute to Kidjel's ratio system into the U. Congressional Record on June 3, Although Kidjel's foray into mathematical proof was not successful, the dividers were relatively popular with draftsmen in the s and s.

Kidjel was also widely respected as an artist, and his artwork was exhibited at the Smithsonian in June After a biographical note, Kidjel provided supposed solutions to the three classic construction problems of Greek antiquity trisecting the angle, squaring the circle, and doubling the cube.

Although the Cali-Pro was not needed for these attempted solutions, in part two of the book Kidjel explained how to make these and other, more standard, solutions with the device. Next, he discussed how his ratio applied to the human body. Finally, he explained how to use the Cali-Pro in various fields of industrial design, such as architecture and publishing.

A brief biography of Kidjel's business partner, Kenneth W. Young, is found inside the back cover. The back cover reproduces a portion of then-U. Representative Daniel Inouye's remarks about the Kidjel ratio system, read into the Congressional Record of the 86th Congress. It provides instructions for the Cali-Pro, a proportional divider developed by Maurice Kidjel for making drawings in what Kidjel believed was the "universal ratio," 5.

Basically, you measure with the shorter end, the end closer to the red pin, and compare or transfer with the larger end. This is for taking a smaller picture and making it bigger. If you're taking a larger picture and shinking it, of course you'd go the opposite way with your measurements, but usually, us artists want to increase the size of our reference photos. The closer the red pin is to the points, the larger the proportion is transfered to the other ends. Here above you see I've got a measurement of my total width.

With out disturbing the setting there is a little tension provided by the clip to keep the pointers from moving , I check the width of my tablet. This falls nicely into the width of my tablet, so I mark it. If the center red pin is not in the proper location, and my pointers are off the page, my pin needs to come "away" from the short end. If the pointers are located way too far inside my drawing space, then the red pin needs to be positioned closer to the short end. Above, I'm checking the height.

It comes in nicely too, so I draw a box around the perimeter of my tablet to establish my outside edges using these measurements. As I continue to draw using this divider, I measure different aspects and elements within the photo above to see if I have transferred those measurements correctly to the drawing.

These are strictly comparative measurements. If I have a mistake, I erase and use the pointers as a guide. Here, you see my final outline sketch of the drawing.