ANNOUNCEMENTS:

• Last chance to get 50% off on the master course, Exploring Tertiary Colors.  Sale ends at midnight. 

• We are getting ready to launch a new Substack webpage where you can access everything we do from one place and a lot more.        Substack is free of ads, closed to email grabbers, and free of algorithms. I'll be making an announcement about this exciting move soon.  Stay tune!

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 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.

That's relative size, better known as perspective.

Let's explore that visually.

In this scene our eyes locate a house and a shed in a yard with woods behind the buildings.  Within that two-dimensional format of the photo, because of where each building is placed within it, our eyes read them some distance away from where we are.

When I bring the shed closer to the bottom of the format without changing its size, notice how it appears smaller, like a toy shed.  It's relative size to the house now feels wrong because we first perceived it in relation to the size of the house and the woods.

When I take that relationship of space away and present both buildings in a flat two-dimensional negative space, the size of the shed located at the bottom doesn't bother us. It actually feels a bit taller than the house. Neither shape has a reference except to each other.

When I bring back the three-dimensional space and increase the size of the shed while keeping located near the bottom, it feels right again, and makes more sense with a three-dimensional space to live in. 

That little exercise demonstrates the importance of paying attention to the size and location of our images when we place them in relationship to each other within the expression of three-dimensional space.

Light and Shadow: The one thing that lets our eyes see.
Visual Movement: What our eyes do when images are visible.
Seeing Beyond the Image: The possibilities beyond just describing what our eyes see.
Freeing the Artist Within (Curiosity): Finding our individual interpretation to what our eyes are seeing. 
Composing:  Finding ways to put together all that we discover.
Drawing:  Searching the potential of images.
The Craft:  Continually forging our skills to visually communicate what we continue to discover with our eyes, mind and soul.

And the eighth:

The Art:  The results when all the above are working together.