The tiniest changes make a huge difference

Christoph Niemann "Walk in the Park"

 From the "Cover Story" feature: 

You condensed a pedestrian into a remarkably small number of pixels, and his dog into just three of them. How did you pull this off?

I start the drawing by setting up a tiny Photoshop document. (For those who are familiar with the software, this one is only forty-four pixels wide.) With such a coarse grid, it’s very difficult to draw recognizable objects. I try to squeeze in as much as possible by arranging elements of the image in context to one another. The tiniest changes make a huge difference. If I had placed the same dog next to the person, it would look twice as big—if I moved it up, where the street is, it would be a grizzly bear with an orange T-shirt.