![]() (Some galleries note the measurements in millimetres which means no decimal point…just numbers.) You’ll find that some museums give dimensions only in inches or centimetres rather than both but they’ll be written as they should be: inches are written with fractions while centimetres use a decimal point. Measurements are written both in centimetres and in inches and each notation looks quite different – the centimetres are written with a decimal point, the inches with fractions. ![]() I’ve been preparing for our Looking at Art session in the IGNITE! Membership (where we look at paintings related to the month’s theme) and I’ve been cruising around the Art Gallery of Ontario. ![]() Gawd that’s an awful lot of numbers for an art blog but I needed to get this peeve off my chest! So let’s look at a couple of images. But the reality is, inches come with fractions! ( A side note: I bet many of those decimalised inches aren’t even correct! Want to know how to make a correct decimal out of a fraction? See the video I’ve posted at the end.)įractions are a right pain so it’s easy to understand that a person might want to avoid them. So the question is, why do people write inches with a decimal point? Well it’s a heck of a lot easier that’s for sure! Just pop a decimal point in and voila! And traditionally, inches are written with fractions and I can visually conjure these up as I’ve been brought up using inches. BUT as an artist rather than an engineer or a person in construction-land, I don’t need limitless. Certainly, fractional inches are limited whereas decimal inches are limitless. You can of course create a decimal from a fraction. (Remember back to math class? That may be difficult I know!) Anyway, you can see we’re talking about fractions. Not a decimal point in sight. We try to make the lowest equivalent fraction. If we have 4/16 then that fraction becomes a 1/4. So we can have 1/16 of an inch or 5/16 of an inch. (Still no tens to be seen!) Each inch is usually divided into 16 parts. Inch fractions use denominators that are powers of 2 and go up to a 64th of an inch. With inches, we’re talking about a base of 2 (rather than 10). So 0.5 is five out of 10, 0.7 is seven out of 10, 0.01 is one out of 100. When we use a decimal point, we’re talking about numbers with a base of 10. Why? Because inches are written with fractions! Do you write 5 1/2 x 7 1/8 in? Or do you write 5.5 x 7.125 inches? I hope you write the former rather than the latter. Okay, pet peeve coming up! How do you write inches? Let’s say we’re talking about a painting that’s five and a half inches by seven and three eighths inches.
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