I was reading a picture book with my daughter when she said, “Look, the Snow Queen is bigger now.”Surprised, I answered – “Oh, she’s not smaller there, just further away.” My daughter looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Why had I said that the Snow Queen was further away when she patently wasn’t – when she remained an arm’s length away, still on the page?
My jumbled explanations made me realise that I had been taking for granted the capacity for seeing perspective on a two-dimensional page. But linear perspective is no more than a convention, and for it to be understood requires training your vision to recognise and make sense of the convention. Specifically, it requires that you imagine yourself occupying a fixed point-of-view, from which the size of the objects in sizes – relative to that imagined point in space. The smaller the object, the further it is from the imaginary point.The larger the object – well, you get the idea. For most of us, linear perspective is so familiar that this kind of step-by-step explanation feels redundant. But for my daughter – whose picture books, I now realise, rarely feature the technique – the effect simply doesn’t register. Her eye has not been trained.
