Nativity Scene Mistakes to Avoid

Structure and composition

1 · Flat ground

The most common mistake, and the hardest to fix. Flat ground has no depth, no matter how good the rest is. You need at least 1 inch of rise for every 10 inches of depth, ideally in a steady slope from back to front.

Fix: you can’t, once it’s built. That’s why you start with the ground.

2 · The stable in the center

In the middle, it splits the scene into two matching, lifeless halves, and leaves no room for a path leading up to it. Move it off-center by a third.

Fix: easy, as long as it isn’t glued down yet. One more reason to lay everything out before you glue anything.

3 · A visible corner between the backdrop and the ground

It screams “box.” A strip of thin, bendable cardboard glued in a curve between the back and the floor gets rid of it in ten minutes, and makes the backdrop look several yards farther away.

Fix: the cove, which you can add even to a nativity that’s already built.

4 · Everything is visible

If nothing hides anything, everything sits on one flat plane. Things that are partly hidden look farther away: a bush in front of a house, a wall cutting across a path, a figure you only see from the chest up.

Fix: easy, and free. See overlap.

Building

5 · The wrong scale

An 8-inch door next to a 3-inch figure doesn’t look grand; it just looks wrong. At that size, a door is about 3¼ inches tall and a step about ¼ inch. Keep the scale chart handy: converting to real scale.

6 · Steps that are too high

A special case of the last one, but so common it gets its own spot. A step is about ¼ inch high for a 3-inch figure. Almost everyone makes them twice that, and the stairs end up looking like bleachers.

7 · A roof set on top, with no overhang

A roof that stops flush with the walls looks like a lid. Roofs always stick out: about ⅛ inch for a Provençal house, up to ⅝ inch for a mountain chalet. And without a ridge on top, it looks unfinished. See eave cornice, ridge, overhangs.

8 · Floating buildings

A wall, a house or a well should sink into the ground, not sit on top of it. Bury it about ⅜ inch, add a little dirt and greenery around the base, and cut the base at an angle on sloping ground.

Color and light

9 · The gray wall

Real stone is rarely plain gray: it’s beige, ocher, greenish, stained. A gray wall means you skipped the base color step. See the four passes.

10 · Shine

Under a nativity’s low lighting, even a slightly glossy surface catches a spot of light and gives the material away. Make sure your acrylic paints are really matte (many are satin), and only use matte varnish, and only on pieces that get handled.

11 · White light from above

That’s store-window lighting. Nativity light is evening light: warm (2,200–2,700 K), low, raking, and sparse. (Raking means it comes in from the side at a low angle.) Three or four lit spots, and everything else in soft shadow. See lighting.

12 · Too much green

The first instinct is to cover everything in moss. In nature, plants grow where there’s water and shade, and nowhere else. Leave a third of the ground as bare earth and rock. And in Provence, the landscape is ocher, not green.

Figures

13 · The crowd

Forty figures in 20 inches make a crowd, not a village. Open space is what gives a sense of scale. If you have more figures than room, rotate them from year to year: it’s more fun for everyone, including you.

14 · Everyone facing the audience

The figures should look at the stable, or at what they’re doing. Almost none should look at the viewer, who is just watching the story unfold. And lined up evenly along a path, they look like fence posts: group them in threes or fives, with space between the groups. See how to set up a nativity scene.

Use and calendar

15 · The nativity complete on December 1

You miss three good things at once: the manger should stay empty through Advent, the Baby Jesus is laid in it on Christmas Eve, and the Three Wise Men take twelve days to cross the scene. A nativity that changes every day beats a perfect one that never moves. See when to put up the nativity.

The final test

Before you call it finished, do three quick thirty-second checks.

1. The photo

   Take a photo from where people will stand, with the overhead light off and the nativity lights on. A camera sees with one eye instead of two, so depth problems jump right out.

2. The squint

   Squint until you only see big shapes. You should see three levels of brightness: dark in front, lighter in the middle, lightest at the back.

3. Child’s-eye height

   Crouch down to the level of the nativity. That’s where kids, half your audience, will see it from, and a lot of things that work from above don’t work from there.

And one last habit: your eye should end up on the manger. If it stops somewhere else (a building with too much detail, a light that’s too bright, a figure in the wrong spot), that’s the real problem, and it’s worth fixing even if you have to take something apart.