Comparisons

Creating a sculpture or even a real-life drawing is all about comparisons. Bridgette says that all art is about comparing. You compare one thing to another. The size of a hand compared to the length of the arm, compared to the size of the chest. Many famous artists and one, in particular, was very interested in comparing. He wrote notebooks about it. Leonardo Davinci spent a lot of time noticing things. Have you ever done that? For example, sitting in your class, you might notice that the blackboard height is almost one-half of the room's height. ( I made that up. ) Or there are 24 tiles across the ceiling in the math classroom. Davinci noticed EVERYTHING, and he put it down in notebooks. You can't help but wonder if Mr. Tough ever read Davinci's notebooks. There is a lot about architecture in there. 

Bridgette will use some of these comparisons herself. How many heads high is her subject? Did you know that if you put the line in your wrist at your chin and your hand is straight, your middle finger will reach your hairline? This helps not to make hands too small or too big when sculpting. 

Bridgette keeps notes on the different people as she sculpts them. She also has to learn and research the people that her subject knew. For example, when creating a recent monumental sculpture of Booker T. Washington. She had to know how tall he was. Booker T. lived a long time before Mr. Tough, and his height was nowhere to be found in her research. So how do you find out how tall someone is that lived over 100 years ago? She found a photograph of Booker T. with other influential men. For example, in this picture, President Taft was six feet, and Andrew Carnegie was Five feet three. So she could compare and find that Booker T. Washington was about five feet seven inches tall. Wasn't that fun? She truly is a detective. 

For Teachers and Students. 

• How many heads high are you? 
• Have you compared things? What did you compare, and what did you find? 

Here is a video of how to measure proportions of things. The two hints are- keep your arm straight and close one eye when looking. Watch how this person finds out how many widths of the bottle fit in the height- from his perspective.