This Rat Paints With His Lil Feet, In Other News I Am Fully Sobbing

Deciding to go into art of any kind is definitely one of the more difficult paths to take in life, particularly fine arts like painting. That’s why phrases like “an artist is never truly appreciate in their day” and clichés like the “starving artist” exist — because, well, there’s truth to them. As is the case with a lot of commissioned-based work, painting or illustrating can make for more stable hobbies than careers, unless of course you have more than one source of income, or if you’re a little pet rat and you don’t actually need any source of income because, as I said, you’re a rat.

Amalie Markota Andersen is an animation and digital arts student in Askim, Norway, and Darius is her pet rat, who is also an artist — thanks to Amalie.

“I got a non-toxic watercolor set, dipped his lil hands and feet in it and just let him walk back and forth on the paper until it started to look like something,” Amalie told Insider

Yep, buckle up folks, we’re going on a feels-trip:

Darius paints pictures with his tiny little feetsies.


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Amalie estimated that each painting took him about ten minutes, which is pretty impressive when you compare that to how painstakingly long other masterpieces took. Yeah, I said masterpieces, because LOOK.

THIS IS A MASTERPIECE


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LOOK AT HOW PROUD HE IS OF HIS WORK!!!


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LOOK AT HIS LITTLE

T O E S


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My heart is going to explode

After Amalie posted photos of this incredibly brilliant boy and his work it didn’t take long until Darius actually had commissions coming in, which is exactly what he deserved because JUST LOOK AT THAT TALENT. Now, obviously the money from these commissions went to Amalie because Darius is a rat and generally speaking rats do not have bank accounts, but the money he earned went towards literally the best possible thing:

A little harness so that he could explore the outdoors!!!!


Courtesy of Amalie Markota Andersen/Insider

This is so fucking CUTE I am LOSING my SHIT. I’m gonna throw something. I will literally trash this whole office because this is so adorable and I CANNOT HANDLE IT


Amalie adopted Darius in 2017 and nobody knew how old he was then but she assumed he was already a little old man, and unfortunately he passed away earlier in 2019. (I told you this was a feels-trip.) But Amalie and we can all take solace in the fact that he had an extremely rich life full of outdoor adventures and enjoying painting, his art is still out there somewhere in circulation, and hopefully his pieces will be worth millions someday.

Published at Tue, 24 Sep 2019 20:39:21 +0000