This guy has no sense of scale!

It's always a challenge to decide which pieces to feature in your portfolio. I was proud of this illustration. When I'm working in this style I aspire to be a second rate Norman Rockwell, but I was really pleased with how the characters came out in this piece. I featured it on my website, I put it on a promo card.

After it was circulating for years I had two different people tell me they didn't think I had a grasp of human proportion, that the man is too big in relation to the kids. Well, duh, I thought, he's A GIANT! The book is Giants Don't Go Snowboarding! But, when I display the piece I usually show it without the type, so how would anybody know that? Another problem is that he is just a little bit bigger than is probably possible. Since its a Bailey School Kids Book, one of the underlying premises is that this character might possibly be an oversized human rather than a giant, so I can't go too extreme.

So, if I had made him 20 feet tall, people would have known he's obviously a giant, if he was 7 feet tall, they would think he's a large human. As it is, I look like I have no sense of scale!