Tiny people and giants

Hello,

A lot of my designs play with size. As a boy I remember looking closely at things and imagining I was a tiny person exploring them, climbing inside a flower or riding on the back of a fly.

We overlook the interesting details on small things. When you really peer at things your imagination starts to whirr into life. Insects look like spaceships, a bit of dirt and a few stones become a landscape, your dog becomes a great beast.

Here are some examples of what I’m talking about. All of these are available as prints in my shop.

We Might Be Giants is my take on the kind of floral designs you see so many of. I like floral designs because they’re very pretty, but I don’t know why there aren’t more fun and interesting takes on the floral. You can hide a lot of good things among foliage.

Air Traffic shows lots of people riding on birds and insects. This is the kind of thing I spend my time imagining. There’s not much more to say than that. I painted these on cardboard first then started from scratch to make them look cleaner using a kind of collage technique.

Treehousing is me pretending to be an architect. I like drawing houses and I like drawing trees. Here are some tiny people in houses in trees.

Treehousing and We Might Be Giants started off as large three metre long paintings which I scanned in and tinkered with digitally to turn into patterns.

Pop! is simply people floating around in bubbles. I like this one because it feels lifelike - all of us in our own little worlds, occasionally reaching out to each other.

One more example is Tiny Dancers. When I painted my Twelve Dancers for Kit Kemp I started experimenting with reversable dancers that worked both ways up.

To make the pattern more interesting than just a few dancers, I made them tiny. I did this by adding some random objects.

Those are a few of my designs where giant things are tiny and tiny things are giant. I know I’ll make more in the future.

David