There are two ways to determine the scale of your micro model:
Decide on a scale before you begin building.
Figure out the scale after you’re done building.
Let’s look at each method separately.
Pretend for the moment that you’re building a model to go along with something a friend is building. Perhaps you’re putting together a microscale town. The two of you agree to a scale of about 1:100. This ensures that no matter what subject matter you use for inspiration (real buildings, photos, drawings, and so on), the structures you build will have similar proportions.
Note
Picking a scale for a project like this is really arbitrary. You want to select a scale with a fairly large difference between the two numbers. In this example, you’ve picked 1:100, but you might also find success with other scales. If you’re both building gigantic skyscrapers for a microscale city, you might want to build at an even smaller scale like 1:200 or 1:300. Remember, the bigger the second number is, the smaller the model will actually be.
Deciding upon a scale prior to building means that you will use the scale factor to know how big your model should be. For example, a real life 100-foot tall water tower would become just over a foot tall when built as a 1:100 scale LEGO model. A 25-foot corner store would be only 3 inches tall when modeled in LEGO bricks. Put together on a table, these two models would look as though they belonged to the same scene. Building to a specific scale helps you make sure such elements look right together.
The second method, for determining scale, works exactly opposite to what I’ve just described. I used the second technique for the earlier Empire State Building example. I decided on the overall shape of my structure and then found LEGO elements that matched a particular part of it. Then I decided what other pieces to use based on how big they needed to be compared to those first parts I picked out. In the end, my model was about 7 inches high. Because I know that the real structure is 1,250 feet tall, I can figure out the scale using some more simple math:
1250 x 12 = 15000
(This converts the building’s height from feet into inches, since I used inches to measure my model.)
15000 ÷ 7 = 2143
It’s easy to see that the Empire State Building I described above was built to a scale of 1:2143. Now that’s micro!