“I always loved nature and my interests were connected with it. I believe that people who love nature also must love art.”

Serbian artist prodigy Dušan Krtolica, now 19, shared this to The Epoch Times, speaking of his lifelong passion—one that has made him world-famous since childhood: drawing his amazingly realistic animals.

Dušan began drawing when he was just 2 years old, as he shared: “At first, I was drawing some unrecognizable shapes; later, those shapes started to resemble animals.” The young artist, from Belgrade, doesn’t remember the first animal he drew; his parents say it was a whale. As his works increased in detail, so did his fame increase, with some hailing him as the next Albrecht Dürer.

“When I was younger, I spent my whole days drawing because it was a game for me,” Dušan said. “I would often draw just a few lines and then start working on something else. I would use up whole packages of paper—around 400 pieces of paper—that my parents were buying me, weekly.”

Not only are Dušan’s creatures incredibly detailed, but they’re remarkably correct anatomically for such a young artist. “I have read a lot of encyclopedias so I learned their anatomy through those books,” he shared. Amazingly, he retained the images that he saw and transferred them onto paper. “I always drew fast and I created works just how I imagined them in my head,” he shared. “I often incorporated a lot of detail into them, so it was never a problem for me.”