Published by the ever-innovative art blog It’s Nice That, brand new zine If Drawings Were Photographs finds designer Rob Matthews (the madman responsible for printing a 5000-page book comprised entirely of Wikipedia entries) deftly recreating a series of pseudo-abstract sketches by illustrator Tom Edwards.

The act of translating art from one medium to another can never be completely clean cut. Indeed, the unavoidable limitations of adaptation can be the very factors that lend the work an unexpected new dimension. Think of the automatic poetry that results from translating text into a foreign language and then back again. Those flaws and gaps are rarely put to good use, but in this instance, the graceful execution of Matthews’ interpretations allow the mismatched equivalences to shine and transcend both the photographs and the illustrations that inspired them. Matthews and Edwards have created something here that’s far greater than the sum of its parts.

See Also: It’s Nice That 2, a printed compilation of the blog’s featured artists.