Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project is a blog documenting an art project by artist, Slinkachu. I love the subtitle of the blog, it so elegantly and succinctly sums up the project: "Little handpainted people, left in London to fend for themselves".

Slinkachu - 20 Inches Under The Sea

I've mentioned my love of miniatures before on this blog and this art hits all my buttons - miniatures - check, slightly disturbing - check, dedicated obsessiveness - check.

I adore the fact that most people will pass these little tableaux by, totally unaware of the tiny dramas taking place beneath their feet. It reminds me of The Borrowers, a series of books that I passionately adored as a child: I was always captivated by the idea that other lives could be going on around us, almost completely hidden from view.

I particularly enjoy the random element of this project - the way the tiny people are obviously painstakingly made but then just abandoned to their fate. It reminds me of the way my brothers used to set up elaborate battle scenes with their plastic soldiers in our garden that would leave my Dad cursing when a forgotten one invariably wound up mangled in the lawnmower!

As someone always prone to anthropomorphising everything, I was usually pretty nice to my dolls (although my Sindy was always slutting it up with the Action Men in a jeep!) but I've heard surprising amounts of rather disturbing stories of doll torture. I'm always amused by people who think that childhood is a time for bunnies, pastels and sweetness and light - I always wonder if they've ever met any actual children! Of course there's an innocence and sweetness to childhood, but there's a darkness there as well and that darkness often seeps out in the way children mistreat their 'little pretend people' with casual or even gleeful cruelty.

Slinkachu - Cash Machine

Slinkachu - Spare Some Change

There's clearly plenty of social commentary going on in this art too - this isn't a cheerful world of little teapots and tiny plates of food but an urban world of litter, violence, random encounters with prostitutes, clueless tourists and homelessness. It reminds me of another of my favourite blogs - Overheard In New York is a blog that hilariously documents the more surreal aspects of living in a large city as revealed through randomly overheard conversations.