While some artists are taught their trades, others appear to be born with a natural ability and desire to create. Duan Krtolica, a Serbian child prodigy, began sketching as soon as he was old enough to wield a pencil at the age of two. Krtolica’s art was already exhibiting enormous promise when we first found it four years ago, when he was 11 years old. His artistic talents have clearly improved as he has grown older, but his favorite subject remains the animal kingdom.
Krtolica creates anatomically precise creatures, flora, and wildlife entirely from memory, using pencils or black pens. When his parents purchased him a thorough encyclopedia of animals, the young artist’s fascination with the natural world started. “I’m going to sketch all of them,” Krtolica said after absorbing the photos and quantity of information. From elephants to antelopes, Krtolica’s intricate animal paintings depict each creature’s hair, tusk, and hoof.
However, Krtolica isn’t just interested in living things; like many children, he is also fascinated with dinosaurs and other early animals. He just got the opportunity to develop and draw his own prehistoric animal-filled encyclopedia, which was published. “Our world is four and a half billion years old,” Krtolica says on Facebook. The whole human existence would fit into the final few minutes if the history of the Earth were condensed into one year. But what sort of species would we be if we didn’t want to learn about what happened millions of years before we were born?”
Duan Krtolica, a Serbian child prodigy, draws extraordinarily realistic animal drawings at the age of 15, demonstrating a level of competence much above his years.
His anatomically accurate drawings are entirely based on recollection.
