The arithmetic of visibility
A mistake in a large piece can recede. The eye travels, finds something better to look at, moves on. At small scale the eye has nowhere to go — it lands on the thing and stays there. That centimetre of fringe, that slight waver in a cut, that fold where the paper buckled just enough: all of it is the piece now. The work does not contain the flaw; the flaw contains the work.
This is not a problem to solve. It is a condition to respect.
I came to small work thinking it would be quicker, and it is — until the moment it isn't. A cut that might read as a design choice at full spread becomes unmistakably a failure at fifty millimetres. The blade has to mean it. The hand cannot be casual. Every millimetre is genuinely a significant portion of the whole, and the eye does the maths without being asked.
There is also something about physical constraint that sharpens thought. When you have very little space, you make decisions. You cut the thing or you do not cut it. There is no room for the hedge, the almost, the we'll-see-how-it-reads-from-a-distance. There is no distance. The viewer is already there.
I am suspicious of the assumption that scale equals ambition. A piece the size of a playing card can be more demanding than something that fills a wall — not because small is inherently harder, but because small is unforgiving of anything approximate. The work earns its scale or it exposes itself. Often both at once.
Blade life matters more here than anywhere. A blade that is ninety percent sharp is plenty adequate for large cuts. At small scale, ninety percent is a visible lie.
Work small if you want to be honest about what you can actually do.