Light bulbs! Either the mug is huge or the painting is teeny, which brings up the first requirement for size as a visual element: Size requires clues--there must be a comparison, else size doesn't translate.
Size and Proportion
Seeing a photo of a marble or a tennis ball singularly tells us absolutely nothing about the size of either, but a photo of the two spherical objects together tells us about the size of both because we can see their relative proportion to each other.
We can draw the human body's proportion accurately by comparing the length of the head to its other parts. Keeping all the parts' sizes relative to the head (or any other part for that matter) will guarantee we render individual parts the right size therefore enabling us to create a human image in proportion to itself.
Leonardo shows this in a diagram he did for us with his famous Proportions of Man.

Size and Proximity
One way size affects shapes is to show their distance from one another. Our vision is such that the further away a thing is, the smaller we see it compared to anything in front of it. Looking out my window I can see trees. I can hold up one finger and totally block out a tree not thirty feet away from me. The same finger can block out five trees a hundred feet away. My finger is certainly much smaller than any of those tree trunks, yet its proximity to my eyes makes it appear larger by comparison.

Size and Foreshortening
But size plays yet another role-- it also enables us to foreshorten. So what does it mean to foreshorten and why is it important to know?
(To stray a bit), prowling the internet, I was hoping to find a clear explanation for foreshortening, but all I could find was a lot of dense rhetoric that I think fails to communicate exactly what foreshortening does. So let's begin with an illustration. Look below at the two photos of the same male cardinal.

The space between two ends of an image is shortened any time the image's length is other than parallel to our eyes.

Because the middle cow's rear end is closer to our eyes than its head, we see it shorter from head-to-tail than the cow on the left, but longer than the cow on the right whose backside is much further from our eyes than its head. So how much a thing is foreshortened depends upon the proximity of each it's two ends to the viewer's eyes.
Head spinning? Not to worry. None of this is necessary to know if you're a keen observer of what your eyes are actually seeing rather than what your left brain tells you you're seeing. However, when we know this stuff, we can feed it to the left brain so that it will reinforce what our right brain is responding to.
Happy seeing!
4 comments:
Great Dianne! I have a very strong left brain that insists on knowing the formulas and the 'whys'. I almost drove me crazy. But the day it all came together and I realized how to SEE. Then I wondered why I spent so much time 'knowing' perspective diagrams, golden mean/spiral, etc. Glad I did the study, because I just couldn't believe it was what you see in relationship to other things.
Hey Vicki, It's truly amazing, isn't it. It's all right there in front of our eyes.
Yup. Like seeing through to 'the other side'. you have to get you out of the way!
Post a Comment