# In this drawing, the dog outranks the whole family

> A family portrait in wax crayon where every person is the same height and the dog stands taller than all of them — which is a ranking, not a mistake in scale.

August 20, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/everyone-drawn-the-same-height

Four people in a row, drawn in thick soft-black wax crayon. Every one of them is exactly the same
height and width. Arms come straight out of the sides of their heads. Everyone is smiling. Beside
them, a dog — taller than all four.

Nobody in this house is actually the same height. The dog is not the tallest thing in the family.
Neither of those is a mistake.

## Why is the dog drawn taller than every person in the family?

Because significance, not size, is what decides how big something gets drawn at this age.

A study by Thomas (1989, in the *British Journal of Developmental Psychology*) found that the
significance a child attaches to a subject changes how large they draw it: figures characterised
positively come out reliably bigger, figures characterised negatively come out smaller. A dog drawn
taller than every adult in the house isn't a scale error — it's a straightforward statement of rank,
made by someone with no reason to hide his opinion.

## Why does everyone else come out exactly the same height?

Because at this stage, height isn't being used to measure anyone against anyone else — the family is
one undifferentiated unit, and the dog is the one figure that got singled out.

Grown-ups read a lineup of identical figures as an error waiting to be corrected — surely the tallest
adult should be tallest on paper too. That's an adult's use of scale, measuring against a ruler. A
child's use of scale here is measuring against feeling, and on that measure the family reads as one
flat, equal group with a dog standing above it.

## Why shouldn't a drawing like this be tidied up before it's printed?

Because straightening the arms, evening the heights or squaring up the smiles would erase the exact
information the drawing is being kept for.

The wobble in the line and the arms coming straight out of the heads aren't errors to correct on the
way to a shirt — they're dated, in the way [a first drawing that got named before anyone asked what
it was](/stories/first-drawing-that-was-of-something) is dated: this is what his hand could do,
and how he saw rank, at exactly this age, and it will look completely different a year from now.

## Who does this drawing actually belong to, and what does that mean for printing it?

Him — and that turns out to be good news rather than a complication.

### The parent administers it; the opinion is still his

Copyright in a drawing belongs to whoever made it, regardless of age; nothing in the law hands a
parent ownership of a work their child created. In practice, a parent manages and licenses that work
on the child's behalf until he's grown — which is exactly the arrangement here, and it means the real
question isn't whether you're allowed to print it, but which drawing he'd actually pick. Children
have firm opinions about which version is the good one, long before they can explain copyright, and
asking him is both the correct thing to do and very likely to produce a better answer than guessing.
It also settles a harder question further down the line: if there's ever a real figure to draw — a
named character, a real crest — that's licensable material belonging to somebody else entirely, and a
different conversation. This one is entirely his to begin with. The mechanics of actually getting a
drawing onto fabric — files, redraws, resolution — are covered separately in [turning a child's
drawing into a print](/stories/kids-drawing-on-a-shirt); the question here was only ever about
permission, not process.

## Does this work for a drawing of just one figure, or does it need the whole group?

Either — a solo portrait of the dog alone, drawn at whatever scale he gave it, carries the same
information without needing the rest of the family for contrast.

What matters is keeping the scale he actually used, group or solo. [A wordless guess at what a parent
does all day](/stories/what-they-think-you-do-at-work) works the same way: the accuracy isn't
the point, the child's own logic showing through is.

## Shouldn't the family be drawn at their actual relative heights instead?

No — correcting the heights would turn a ranking into a measurement, which isn't what the drawing is.

If accurate proportion were the goal, a photograph would already do the job better than any drawing
could. What a crayon portrait offers instead is a five-year-old's read on where everyone stands, and
that only survives if the heights stay exactly as drawn — including the one detail every adult wants
to fix, which is usually the most telling part of the whole picture to leave alone.

## How does a drawing like this hold up on fabric?

Well, provided the crayon's texture survives rather than getting smoothed into a flat vector fill.

Thick wax crayon has visible pressure and unevenness that a print should keep rather than clean up —
it's what makes the design read as drawn by a hand rather than generated to look like one. One solid
dark tone against a pale garment is usually enough; adding more colours than the original crayon used
tends to make it look redrawn rather than reproduced.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the drawing at [JustOG](/) — who's in it, and what he told you about who's who.
Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to
order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Nobody in the house is actually that dog's height. He's just the one who mattered most that day.