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Size Matters: The Importance of Scale

“It's not the size of the dog, but the size of the dog's fight.”

—Mark Twain

A character's scale can vary from sequence to sequence. If you are designing “Jack and the Beanstalk,” your hero will have two size relationships. The first one will be to the objects in his home, and the second to objects in the Giant's castle. Scale is established by designing the props with the character, but insufficient information can cause confusion.

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[Fig. 7–1] Jack and two chairs. The scale is ambiguous in (b).

In Figure 7–1(a) we can accept that Jack is a normal-sized man with a normal-sized chair since they appear to ...

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