that it’s not totally clear what either the two dots or the ‘1’ (or the ‘to’ when spoken) mean here. I find that often the insecurity that many people have when getting used to working in scale for the first time comes mainly from the way it’s written or referred to i.e.

the drawing or model is ‘one twenty-fifth’ the size of the original. So, as another example, 1:25 (spoken as ‘one to twenty-five’) should be more easily understood as just saying ‘1/25’ i.e. So ‘half-size’ would be written as 1:2 (spoken as ‘one to two’) where, in a way, the colon dots are just replacing the dash in ‘1/2’ when written as a fraction. you’re seeing it ‘half as big’ or ‘half-size’ or even ‘twice smaller’! That’s where one of the first problems starts, because although I’d guess that most of us understand the phrase ‘half as big’ immediately, we may have a moment’s difficulty with ‘twice smaller’ whereas ‘ten times smaller’ becomes actually easier to understand. The ‘official’ language of scale (the way it’s officially expressed) attempts to avoid the kind of language difficulties which occur between speakers of the same language, let alone between different languages! Also, when recording measurements, it is accepted that anything to do with measurements should be written, not as words, but numerals. So you could describe this smaller size in a number of ways i.e. In other words, we all have a very natural and in-built sense of scale, which we use all the time. They use the natural awareness of scale we all have to gradually piece together a scale drawing freehand, relating the size of first one part of the figure to another or the general whole to the details, and so on. Also when practised artists do life-drawings from a model at a little distance from them they usually don’t have to take a tape measure to the model, reduce all those measurements by the same proportion and map out the figure on the paper like a technical drawing.

In everyday life we don’t have to be conscious of exactly how much smaller than life-size that image is, but in a way our unconscious mind is and uses that calculation to help judge how far away that object is. When we see an object at a distance we don’t question that every dimension of that image (not only height but width etc.) is reduced according to the same proportion or ratio, that is, if the image we receive is half the height that it actually is the width will also be half and the size of every detail will also be half, etc. Everything is divided by the same amount. everything we see, we see in scale! Unless our eyes are glued up against an object, we see that object at a distance, which makes the image we receive of it smaller than lifesize. None of us are strangers to dealing with scale, and we deal with it all the time. Most people who regularly have to model or draw in scale use one of these to avoid mistakes even when the reduction is a simple one. But what if none of these size reductions, in other words scales, give you the size of model you want or allow you to fit drawings on standard sizes of paper? What if you reckon you need something in between, such as ‘twenty-fifth of the size’ or as it’s written, 1:25 which incidentally has established itself, at least here in the UK, as a comfortable scale for theatre design models and technical drawings? Most people would have to use a calculator to divide by 25 and doing this for each and every measurement would be painfully laborious! At some point in the past someone had the bright idea that having, as it were, a miniaturised version of a long tape measure to read from would save a lot of time. which can be done fairly easily in the head! I’ll come back to why they’re written this way (at least, when using metric) later. If that’s still way too big for your purpose, it is just as easy (if you normally use centimetres) to calculate ‘tenth of the size’ by moving the decimal point of each original measurement by one place or ‘hundredth of the size’ by moving it a further place. You can even quite easily arive at ‘twentieth of the size’ by moving first the decimal point one place then halving! So already you’ve got the choice of four possible scales. If you’re new to it, you can for example decide to make a model or a drawing of something using a simple reduction that can be calculated pretty much in the head, such as ‘half the size’, which means you only have to divide each measurement of the original by 2 (or in other words ‘in half’).

What I’ve often found is that although the principle of reducing an object in size is a very simple one, many people who haven’t done it before may assume it’s more complicated than it is. For those who are new to working in scale and need some basic advice or just a simple explanation before starting, here is an overview.

Half inch actual size