To Scale by Frankie Mayo

Scale in art is important aspect of any artwork, especially when painting on large scale.

The artist James Rosenquist is a 20th century pop artist who created billboard-scale works, and his print ‘Time dust’ from 1992 is thought to be the largest print in the world – measuring 7 x 35 feet. By gridding up your work properly, and applying this grid to a larger canvas you can keep the perspective perfect, or distort it to your own choosing.

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‘Anamorphic Perspective’ is a technique employed in many forms of art and essentially means:

‘Distorting an image so that it looks correct only from a specific viewpoint.’

The image is usually completely unrecognisable from any other angle.
One of the most famous applications of this technique is in the painting ‘the Ambassadors’ in which a skull is stretched across the painting but appears completely normal from an oblique angle.

A more modern artist who displays this technique is Felice Varini , a French painter who paints geometric shapes and designs across rooms and hallways, all to the benefit of the viewer if they are at the right angle. Part of the fun of these large illusions is trying to get your head around them, and how one would even begin to compose these,
It is these physical applications of maths, which is cleverly mixed with art, which show how beautiful the process and final product of maths can be. Some are even so powerful the mind doesn’t believe it at first.

This video illustrates how perspective and scaling techniques can be used to create imaginative typographic displays.