Scale is one of the principles that artists need to understand. This project asks the student to draw marbles at various sizes, from as small as they already are to larger than life size.
Many students tend to draw an object at its actual size or its sight size. In this exercise, we get comfortable getting larger. I sometimes have to tell the student to draw the marble as big as a baseball. When they enlarge the scale of the marbles, they start to pay more attention to the characteristics of a marble.
When we are done, we can have an interesting discussion about how the marbles read. Are these marbles the same size, but in different spaces? Do the drawings represent marbles of different sizes? Or are the drawings different sizes, but the subjects were all the same size? Making a still life object larger than life size presents challenges to viewers. I could paint grapes five times larger and people will be convinced they are plums. Can we tell these are marbles? Where does it feel like they are in relation to the viewer?
