Sometimes the area of interest I want to sketch is so distant and apparently small that it would be impossible to draw at sight size. Some years ago I devised this hack to scale it up, which I got to pull out of the toolbox yesterday to do this charming little village on the water on Cape Cod.
To start I rotated the sketchbook to the vertical orientation with the left end on top. Using CerviCarneTable to hold it at a constant distance from my eye, I made little tick marks indicating salient features on the edge of the paper. A few were labeled with initials, e.g. LH for Light House, BD for Big Dune, and LD for Little Dune.
I then rotated it back to horizontal, drew a diagonal from the lower left to upper right, and used a straight edge to draw horizontal lines from each tick mark to its intersection with the diagonal. Drawing vertical lines through each intersection gave me a scaled up set of reference points to place the buildings and other features on the page. I arbitrarily placed the horizon line about a third of the way up and eyeballed the proportions.
The first photo shows the relative size of the village in my overall field of view; the second shows it zoomed in to approximately the angle of vision implied by the sketch.
Turns out that that little village has an interesting history: https://www.capecod.com/lifestyle/sandy-neck-historic-colony-sandy-spit/
