From a distance, the drawing above may look like a fairly normal pen-and-ink drawing. Look closer, and things shift; every detail of the larger drawing contains another, smaller illustration.
"The idea of drawing in small details came to me a long time ago," the artist, Davit Yukhanyan, told The Huffington Post in an email. "As a child I was sure that we and our whole planet are only small details of a huge image, but we also consist in ourselves these small details."
An architect by trade, Yukhanyan actually began working on these artworks as he was beginning his architectural training in 2006. "I started to do sketches on various themes, a lot of sketches," he remembered. In 2012, he finally composed his first full piece, "And When You Lose Control." A lushly rendered ibex, with an octopus clinging to its back, stands against a pale, distant line of mountains; up close, smirking large-beaked birds, curled-up infants, and human-headed cows sprout from the lines of shading.
His second completed work, "Isolated Winner," places the uncanny center stage: A pudgy male figure, with the head and claw of a lobster, relaxes on a block.
The spatial awareness necessary for his architectural work informs these nested drawings, Yukhanyan said. "My architectural experience helps me to quickly orient and to draw exactly what is needed in the smallest paper sector to make the drawing entire," he wrote. "The architect must know how to place a building in the specific space in a manner that it'll get merged with other buildings."
He's currently at work on a third piece, which he described as "a spatial composition." He doesn't expect it to be ready until next year, but his Instagram shows tantalizing glimpses of the work in progress. "At first I'm doing some sketches which I publish on my Instagram page, later on I use them in my 'entire character,'" he explained.
See some more details below. For more from Yukhanyan, check out his Behance, his Etsy, or his Instagram.
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