Inspired by my childhood dreams and further encouraged with my lifelong love for nature and animals, I wanted to create worlds where animals exist as equal characters, as narrators of a modern fairy tale, who share with us the same environment.
By creating peaceful, strange and even humorous situations and twisted animal habitat sceneries which exist somewhere between material world and imagination I want to share my dreamscapes and visions, and offer a visual escape from harsh and often cruel reality.

My works are complex photo collages. I have been collecting photographs for over a decade. It is a long process of combining carefully selected photographs and illustrated parts, which are then transferred to computer and digitally painted.

"I am inspired by my surroundings and I see potential in various everyday things and relations, people, nature, architecture, even food. I see them sometimes as fragments of my work. Most of times they stay just that, fragments, and sometimes they become unified into a whole and therefore start to exist as a part of my sceneries.
By using real life photographs and textures I give my work a feel of realism, although the themes are far from being realistic…"

www.nikolinapetolas.com