Five worlds, one girl.Thumbelina crosses five unrelated worlds in forty pages — a flower, a pond, a wheat field, a mole’s underground parlour, the warm south.My first version gave each world its own palette. The book fell apart into a folder of separate pictures with a girl somewhere inside them.

Thumbelina is the only character allowed to carry all five at once. Wherever she is on the spread — a petal, a leaf, a bird’s back — your eye finds her first, without a single arrow or spotlight.

Half the spreads in a book like this are mostly type, and that is where illustrated series usually fall apart. The text pages sit on the lightest tone of the same palette, with one illustrated element bleeding across the gutter.

This one is not a book. It is a wall you see from three metres away and an object a child stands next to.Ornament is the obvious register for a Russian folk tale, and it is a trap. Enlarged to exhibition scale it turns into noise: from three metres you see pattern, not a bear. Up close the detail is lovely — but by then the visitor has walked past.

From three metres you read the animal instantly; up close the pattern is waiting for you. Six characters on one body construction, told apart by silhouette and by how dense the ornament on their clothes is — never by colour, because colour is the one thing a lit exhibition room changes.