On working bigger (or not)

Some notes on scale, reduction, and enlargement

Hey y’all,

A few months ago I got the urge to draw bigger. I’d been drawing succulents on old sheet music, but then I found an ancient portfolio I used to drag around to drawing classes in college. Inside were some big sheets of blank paper — maybe 18 x 24 inches or larger — some of them half-eaten by whatever critter eats paper.

My first drawing looked like this:

And at first I didn’t really like it! So I let it sit around a while to see how I felt about it. (The best editor is you, tomorrow.)

In that video you can see that I’ve got other big sheets rolled out with screenprinting ink, ready to go. There’s something about having pre-made boxes that makes me want to fill them.

So I started another drawing and hung it next to the first one:

And then I started another:

And then I started another:

Eventually I wound up with four big drawings hanging in my studio:

I got sick of looking at them, so I took photos of them, cleaned them up, and posted them to Instagram:

Taking away the context of the room and showing these drawings on a white background, they lost their sense of scale. On a phone screen, they don’t essentially feel any grander or larger than the smaller drawings I was doing:

left: a drawing on sheet music / right: a drawing 3x the size

An old theory of mine: Online, big work gets smaller, while smaller work stays the same or gets bigger.

You can use this to your advantage. For most of my career, I have worked essentially in miniature, with almost every image I create happening in a small sketchbook or a page no bigger than a piece of typing paper.

It occurred to me very early on that if you take a little sketchbook doodle, scan it, and put it up on your blog, you essentially don’t lose anything in the transmission. (Unlike, say, looking at a tiny reproduction of Raphael’s School of Athens in an art history textbook or something.)

Knowing your work will be reduced changes the way you draw. It blew my mind the first time I saw the size Charles Schulz drew Peanuts: