Pebble Art by Erzsébet Szilajka

If you’ve collected pebbles, you’d certainly recall getting fascinated by their different shapes, sizes, and colours. However, your interest may have not gone beyond just collecting them. But, here’s one pebble collector and artist, Erzsébet Szilajka, who sees every rock as a potential piece of her incredible pebble art.

Says this Hungarian artist, “The colour and shape of the pebbles, the richness of their patterns and the beauty of nature inspire my pebble pictures and works of art.” She possesses an uncanny ability to evaluate each stone and use it at appropriate places in her compositions.

When Szilajka was a little girl, she was fond of collecting stones of a variety of colours and shapes. Just looking at them ignited her imagination. Over time, as her pebble collection grew, she started creating pictures out of her mind’s eye. The pictures were mainly from her childhood days. After a decade of creating her pebble compositions, she realised they constitute a scrapbook documenting her own history.

Szilajka is an expert at selecting the types of pebbles needed for her art. She usually goes in for the ones that’ll be heads, hands, and feet in her images. She then chooses ones that’ll make a good upper body or fit as a skirt. She also segregates pebbles of special shapes and colours to use them in exclusive ways.

According to Szilajka, the most time-consuming part of the whole process is searching for the right pebbles. Once she finds them, she proceeds to wash and clean them and arranges them on a wooden base. She then paints the background, usually with acrylic paints. Her endeavour remains to give her composition a simple and natural look. A single composition can take weeks or even months, depending upon the availability of the right pebbles.

I've put together a gallery of some of my favourites but you can see a lot more on Erzsébet's website and her Facebook page