Some artists use unusual canvases for their work, and Akie Nakata is among them, painting adorable and intricate animals onto pebbles.
Nakata, a self-taught artist from Japan, began working as a stone artist in 2011, but said she has collected stones and rocks since she was a child.
She uses acrylic paints on the stones, and leaves the original shape untouched, neither grinding them nor smoothing them to fit her work.
*****Updated: Found a home. Mar. 8, 22:25 Japan time*****Posted as available for purchase: Mar. 8, 22:20 Japan…Posted by Stone Artist Akie on Thursday, March 8, 2018
Nakata said: “When I find a stone, I feel that stone, too, has found me. Stones have their own intentions, and I consider my encounters with them as cues they give me it’s OK to go ahead and paint what I see on them.
“The stones I decide to paint on are not arbitrary, but my significant opposites with whom I have established a connection, who inspire me to work with them.”
Nakata said: “Stones may fall outside our usual definition of living organisms, but when I think of the long time it takes for a stone to change from a huge boulder in the mountains to the size and shape it has, as rests in my palm, I feel the history of the earth that the stone has silently witnessed over the millennia, and I feel the story inside it.”
Nakata’s work has been incredibly popular on social media, with the artist gathering 21,000 Instagram followers, and 37,200 likes on her Facebook page.
*****Updated: Found a home. Dec. 28, 23:59 Japan time*****Posted as available for purchase: Dec. 28, 23:25 Japan…Posted by Stone Artist Akie on Thursday, December 28, 2017
She said: “To me, completing a piece of work is not about how much detail I draw, but whether I feel the life in the stone.
“We all stand on the same earth, and we come from the same earth.”
