The drawings nobody saw for 2,000 years

Here's the Nazca Lines fact that I find genuinely hard to get my head around. Between 500 BCE and 500 CE, a culture on Peru's southern coast created over 800 straight lines, 300 geometric shapes and 70 animal and plant figures by simply removing the reddish-brown pebbles that cover the desert floor, revealing the paler soil underneath.

And then, for two thousand years, almost nobody saw them properly at all. The lines are so large that from ground level they barely register as anything more than scuffed earth. It wasn't until the 1930s, when commercial pilots began flying over the region, that anyone was in a position to actually see what had been drawn there. Nobody has settled why they were made either, theories range from water and rainfall rituals to an enormous astronomical calendar, and the culture that made them left almost nothing else behind to explain their own intentions.

I painted the lines in watercolour and ink, that pale desert etched with shapes. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Nazca Lines, Peru · Travel Poster