#97 ✍️ The Art of Making Things Bigger Than They Are
How scale and proportions of sketches can give different meaning
👋 Hey, I’m Kumar and welcome to my weekly newsletter. Each week I share Sketchnote(s) on product, leadership, personal growth, and anything that helps you get started on Sketchnoting.
Hey Visual folks.
How are you doing?
Ever notice how sometimes, a tiny little sketch can hold a big truth?
Today, I want to talk about something simple—scale and proportions—and how they quietly whisper (or sometimes scream) the message your sketch is trying to say.
Let me start with a visual prompt. Picture this:
A small, humble figure—could be you—standing beneath a giant glowing light bulb.
Around them? Big, loud folks with megaphones.
The person has a tiny speech bubble.
But that light bulb? It’s massive. Glowing. Demanding attention.
🎯 The Message?
Their idea is huge, but their voice is small. The world hasn’t caught up yet. Maybe they haven’t either.
We didn’t write that out in words. We didn’t need to.
We just played with proportions.
You can do anything with words and pictures!
~=~ Harvey Pekar, American Splendor[3] ~=~
🔍 Why Does This Matter?
In the world of hand-drawn notes and sketchnotes, scale is your volume knob.
You’re not just drawing what’s there—you’re drawing what matters.
Make the phone bigger than the person? You’re hinting that tech controls them.
Draw a kid bigger than their parent? You’re showing who’s really driving the story.
Shrink the problem, enlarge the question mark? Now you’ve got curiosity front and center.
It’s subtle. It’s poetic.
It’s your pencil quietly steering the conversation.
🌀 Flip the Scene
Now take that same sketch—
This time, the person is huge, towering confidently with the light bulb resting calmly in their hand.
The critics? Tiny in the distance. Almost irrelevant.
Suddenly, it’s not a struggle.
It’s a declaration.
They’ve owned the idea.
The power dynamics have shifted.
🎨 Same scene. Same elements.
But just by reversing scale, you told a whole new story.
💡 Sketches from the Community
This theme sparked some beautiful interpretations in TheSketchnoters community, and I couldn’t be more proud!
Here are a few standout sketches from folks who leaned into the prompt and let scale do the storytelling:
🖍️
illustrated a book as tall as building giving a strong message of how books can shape cities.
🖍️
sketched a massive coffee cup dwarfing earth, humorously showing how morning rituals like a cup of tea runs the world. We felt that!
🖍️
drew a show run a person sitting in it to show we are driven by the shoes we wear.
🖍️ Anita drew a massive massive photoframe on the road to communicate how our memories occupy a hug space in our world.
🌟 To everyone who shared—whether you posted publicly or doodled in the margins of your notebook—thank you.
You are the soul of this space. You give shape to feelings we all know but can’t always say out loud.
Your sketches are not just drawings; they’re emotional cartography 🧭.
Keep going. Keep sharing. The world needs your perspective.
🧠 A Thought to Doodle On
Next time you’re sketching, ask yourself:
“What do I want to feel bigger than it is?”
“What should feel smaller than it seems?”
Then let your pen stretch or shrink accordingly.
That’s the beauty of sketching—it’s not realism, it’s emotional ❣️ truth.
So go ahead.
🎯Make mountains out of molehills.
🎯Make voices small and ideas large.
Or make that one quiet thought the biggest thing on the page.
🚨P.S. I have used AI to modify portions of this article to make it engaging and to make the content succinct.
✏️ Until next time, keep sketching the world as you feel it.
Thank you for reading Letsketchin. 🥧
The odd proportions make the drawing the drawings of children so unique. They are not afraid of experimenting with proportions because they portray as they see the world at that moment. This theme is super fun and making usbthink how the story can be changed just by changing the proportion. Thanks 😊