Measuring and Magnifying

You need to be able to measure things in all kinds of art and design. Artists and designers may need to know measurements like:

• the weight of clay to make a pot
• the height of a design in centimetres or inches
• the number of pixels in a digital image

If artists want to produce something at a different scale, they need to enlarge or reduce it. It may get distorted if they don’t know how to do it properly. When you change the size of something you can say it in different ways. These are all ways of saying you will double the size:

• x 2
• 200 per cent
• 2:1 scale

These are all ways of saying you will halve the size:

• x 0.5
• 50 per cent
• 1:2 scale