I hope you enjoy this totally remodeled version on a post from 2018.
Do you ever notice how much you depend upon seeing the relative size of things?
Say you're walking down a street. If your eyes saw everything the size you know them to be, you couldn't find your way. Everything would appear jammed up together, like an awful nightmare. Our eyes are miraculously constructed so that we SEE things as smaller in distance than we see them closer to us.
Over the centuries, artists have devised all sorts of tools to enable their seeing the size relationships of things. 16th century artist Albrecht Dürer came up with this device.
But nothing beats the tools we were born with--our thumb and forefinger.
After all, do we want to have to drag grids and other devices out with us when we're painting in plein air? Instead, we can use the tools that we take with us wherever we go.
Look at how that second chair appears the same height and the leg of the frontal one.
1. Place a chair or stool about eight feet from you in the vicinity of a window.
2. Fully extend your left hand. Align the inside of your forefinger with the top of a leg of the chair and the inside of your thumb with the bottom.
The length of that space in between your is "measurement" for the height of that image at that distance from where you are located.
3. Now without changing your "measurement" and without moving where you are, and keeping your arm extended, swing your arm side to side and up or down and look through your "measurement" at some taller
image than the chair outside the window.
4. Compare its height to your measurement of the chair leg.
Above, you are seeing the relative size of the stool leg to the building out the window. If you change your location, that relative size will change, too. Try
it!
Isn't that amazing engineering--how our eyes work! Those sizes don't change in reality. It's how our eyes see their measurements according to OUR proximity to what we are looking at!
Enjoy a weekend of sizing things up!
During my Language of Painting series, I explained the role of our visual elements. If you'd like to review those roles to better understand the behavior of elements, here are the links to each of those
discussions: Color --Value -- Shape -- Texture -- Size -- Line and Direction
You can access the archive of all my newsletters (as well as the Quick Tips and other stuff) at any time by going HERE.
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