Kseniya Simonova - Sand Animation

Kseniya Simonova is an Ukrainian artist who won Ukraine's Got Talent 2009. She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII.

Pencil People: Sharpest Heads On Earth

When a creative mind starts churning its cogs and wheels, there is no telling what will come out of it. Have you ever held a pencil in your hand and started thinking that with it and a piece of paper you could create something that could potentially last forever? Leonardo da Vinci realized this and got to work, and there are of course numerous artists throughout our history who have found the same insight. But it’s not the easiest of tasks to achieve this illuminated stage. There is more to a pencil than just pencil strokes and shadows. If you start thinking outside the box, there is nothing that will limit your imagination and what you can create with it.
Federico Uribe, an artist with a seemingly unstoppable force of creativity, imagined what others couldn’t. He put together a family made entirely out of pencils and plastic string. But that’s not what is so impressive about it. It is actually a whole family created on a life size scale that will have your mind blown in a matter of seconds. I am not even going to try and venture into the numbers of this one since I am sure they are on the region of hundreds of thousands of pencils.
As if that wasn’t enough, the sharpening, cutting and assembly of these art pieces must have taken forever. You would have thought that after putting this family together, Federico would seriously have had enough of pencils, right? Nope, he set out to create yet another form of pencil art that is even more complex since it is created without the aid of 3D space. By placing pencils diagonally in patterns, he managed to put together some of the most beautiful pieces of art you can imagine, and that’s without even using one single pencil stroke. That’s what I call the edge of creativity.

The Animal Fair: Vibrant Vintage Children’s Illustration by Alice and Martin Provensen

“A little owl looked wise. ‘I think there’s going to be a parade,’ he said.”
As a lover of children’s books, especially vintage ones, I was instantly enthralled by the work of artist-author duo Alice and Martin Provensen, who began their collaboration when they got married in 1944 and went on to produce a wealth of vibrant, textured illustrations wrapped in heart-warming stories of curiosity and kindness. Among their most delightful gems is The Animal Fair (public library), originally published in 1952 and featuring 22 original stories and poems by the Provensens. Along the lively journey to the farmyard, zoo, and forest, we also find humorous semi-useful advice, like “how to sleep through the winter” and “how to recognize a wolf in the forest.”




(It isn’t hard to imagine that Kate Messer’s lovely modern children’s illustrations were inspired by the Provensens’.)

One day a hummingbird sat all by himself on a pole. A sparrow fluttered down and perched beside him. Then a chickadee, a titmouse, a finch, a pippit and other small birds joined them.
‘Is something going to happen?’ asked a wren.
A little owl looked wise. ‘I think there’s going to be a parade,’ he said.

Martin Provensen passed away in 1987. Alice Provensen is 94 years old and continues to illustrate.

John Gerrard Keulemans and William Matthew Hart-Birds of Paradise