Do you ever notice how much you depend upon seeing the size of things? Say you're walking down a city street. If your eyes saw everything the size you know it 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. It's called relative size.
It's a part of seeing in perspective. 16th century artist Albrecht Dürer illustrated with a grid how that
works.
Over the centuries, artists have explored all sorts of tools to enable their seeing things in perspective, but nothing beats the tools we were born with. After all, do we want to have to drag grids and other devices out
with us when we're painting in plein air?
Try this:
Place a chair about four feet from where you are.
Place another chair of similar height about four feet behind the first one.
Extend your hand in front of your eyes aligned with the chair farthest away. Then align your thumb at the bottom of that chair and your index finger at the
top.
Using as your gauge the space between your thumb and finger, compare the size of the farthest chair to the nearest one. That comparison is relative
size.
To use this information, whatever size you choose to draw the chair closest to you, you now know the size to make the one farthest away. Practice this technique for seeing relative size as you move through your
day. Wherever you are, look for size comparisons of things behind things, things in the distance as compared to up close. It's a fun discovering experience.
You will find out that seeing relative size
goes a long way towards seeing things in perspective.
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