It takes just one artist to raise this annual micro-village, putting out a fresh scene daily featuring miniature people going about their everyday lives, navigating repurposed objects designed for different purposes at larger scales.

The new Miniature Calendar by Tastuya Tanaka is the latest in a series of 7, each one featuring 365 snapshots of lives lived small. The figures are often framed by items that are easy to recognize and yet also simple to reimagine in context.

The little humans populating each scene can be seen riding camels over sand dunes, diving between the spirals of a notebook, scaling toothpick architectural towers, strolling down bustling streets with neon sticky note signage and more.

Notebooks, sticky notes, thin plastic sheets and other items found at any art store make up the backdrops for these shots. These are, in turn, turned into books, postcards and calendars by the artist.

As they evolved, illustrated figures in architecture (sometimes called ‘scalies‘) have grown to have more personality, color and life, serving as more than a means to measure relative distances, heights and widths in renderings.

Historically, architectural drawings rarely featured people and, when they did, these were simplified constructs, often just outlines or silhouettes, designed simply to give the viewer a sense of scale.

Over time, start to see figures sitting in furniture, holding books (or recently: mobile devices), groups interacting and other strategies to bring these two-dimensional people to life, and the architectural scenes they inhabit along with them.

Their evolution is not accidental: scalies are often used with very explicit aims, from trying to give people a sense of the use that will take place in a finished building or space to conveying a broader vision of its popularity. Developers, for instance, may want to sell investors on how well their project will do financially, and thus pack drawings with figures to create that impression.

On the flip side, architectural students may take things to opposite extremes, setting lewd, crude or generally absurd scenes for shock value and collegial entertainment.

While some architects simply photo-edit their own scalies out of various images, there are professional makers as well, who take pictures against green screens and sell them in bundles, like “100 Business People” or “100 Casual People.” With the rise of 3D modeling, some companies are starting to capture and sell three-dimensional figures as well.

Increasingly, other ‘support’ objects have coming into play, from cars to carried accessories. Some designers go out of their way to make scalies stand out, using scantily-clad models, impossible characters (like dinosaurs) or famous figures (like a sad Keanu).

Taking the larger view, scalies show us a great deal about times, places and cultural norms; in the mid-1900s, you find men golfing and women in kitchens, dressed (of course) in period attire. Today is no different, but we notice the cultural cues less since these are now our times and places (Images via Gizmodo, Curbed, The New York Times and DesignObserver).

Bringing a certain subtly and sense of humor back to three-dimensional chalk art, David Zenn creates highly-contextual scenes using an array of animal characters, all interacting with urban environments.

For decades, he has used chalk and charcoal to feature pieces that tie into their surroundings, relating to anything from fallen flowers to cracks in the sidewalk.

Rats, bears, lizards, dogs and other less-identifiable animalian hybrids can be found lounging around, floating balloons or hiding in imagined holes, like refugees from a wild children’s book.

Over time, a cast of regular characters has evolved, appearing in different places, telling a story through each sequential work of art. Some of his archival prints are for sale, as well as his book Temporary Preserves (via Colossal).

It sounds like the premise of a science fiction film, but deep in a rural valley of Japan there is a town where eerily lifelike dolls have been slowly replacing actual residents of Nagoro for years – today, the fakes outnumber real people ten to one.

After leaving town for just over a decade, local artist Ayano Tsukimi returned home to find many of his friends, family and neighbors had died or moved away – the population was down to just a few dozen.

While creating a scarecrow for her garden, she decided to model the figure after her father, which turned out to be just the beginning. Thus began a strange art project to create full-sized doll versions of all those who had vanished – hence, Valley of the Dolls (not to be confused with the even-creepier Island of the Dolls in Mexico).

Over the last 10 years, she has created over 350 dolls, many visible to people passing through the town and seemingly engaged in everyday activities – gardening, walking, reading and fishing. The classrooms of a disuses local school have been repopulated with students and teachers, too, forever waiting silently for class to begin (or end).

The documentary by Fritz Schumann (embedded above) goes into the story and motivations of the artist: “Tsukimi discovered her craft almost by accident. When seeds that she planted failed to grow, she decided to build a scarecrow in the likeness of her father. It was only then that she fell upon the idea to recreate the village she once knew. The dolls are made with straw, fabric, and old clothes, much like a humble scarecrow, and Tsukimi is constantly making new figures to replace ones that have worn out.”

Treating abandoned buildings and urban surfaces more like pages in a book than bricks to tag, this street artist brings an illustrator’s touch and storyteller’s approach to his unique graffiti.

Though based in the Netherlands, Daan Botlek frequently ranges far from Rotterdam to cities including Berlin and Bangkok, where he draws surreal scenes with imaginary characters.

Some of these creations seem to be contemplating dangerous acts, while others fight through their artificial environments or even with one another.

These much-humanized, frame-breaking figures are only one facet of his portfolio, but they uniquely bridge the gap between the artist’s experience with illustration on the one hand and street art on the other.

Aside from on-paper drawings and character creation, his other public art series include a set of white cubes, again reprising this three-dimensional approach to bring objects, in this case, off the page (or wall, as it were).