Grid technique - Cheating or Acceptable.

[MnM]

So with that in mind forget about the guilt you are bearing within yourself.

Nope :P . I dont bear any guilt inside me. I made this one to actually ask you guys whether it is acceptable or not. I can very well say all my previous works were not based upon this technique.

Pencil and thumb technique

Yea I heard about it. I do it differently. I actually use only my pencil to check alignments for example, I hold my pencil along the line of nose , jaw and mouth and compare with original. Its all about relativity [EXACTLY as shown in the video link you mentioned] .

However, as we do final corrections, we can overlay with grids and ensure everything is right [we wont probably need it much if u use thumb-pencil technique, though].