Children’s doodles are a thing to be treasured, not overlooked. Sure, the subject isn’t always obvious to the adult eye and children often need to be prompted to explain what they drew, but a man named Tom Curtis believes that children’s art is undervalued for their attempt to capture our reality. In fact, he’s making his own 6-year-old son’s doodles come to life.
Curtis’s son Dom draws anything and everything—from his pet cat and butterflies to sharks and rocket ships. Using Photoshop, Curtis takes his son’s drawings and recreates them as professionally-rendered images of “real life” by rearranging faces, shortening bodies, and adding smiley faces to real photos. Both Dom’s drawing and the “real” image are posted side by side on their joint Instagram account, Things I Have Drawn. The playful project aims to show that the picture Dom drew of an elephant, for example, is what he saw in his head when he looked at an elephant. Curtis comments on the brilliancy behind children’s drawings and why he wanted to showcase them, telling Huffington Post UK, “The original premise wasn’t that I took Dominic’s drawings and showed what they might look like in real life. Instead the idea is about imagining a world in which kids’ drawings are accurate and the things they draw are real. It’s just us silly adults that don’t see them because we’re not looking hard enough.”
Scroll down to see a sample of Dom’s adorable alternate animal kingdom and check them all out on Instagram.
Above: Lion
Cat
Elephant
Butterfly
Shark
Car
Giraffe
Rabbit
Seahorse
Flamingo
Bicycle
Rocket
Dad
Things I Have Drawn: Instagram
via [designboom]