Vera Shimunia is a Russian artist based in Saint-Petersburg who does insane things with embroidery. With over two hundred and fifty thousand Instagram followers, her embroidering skills have gained Shimunia worldwide attention and a burgeoning Etsy shop. She refers to herself as a needle painter and that’s exactly what her pieces feel like, her needle works look like fully realized paintings. Shimunia says, “Most of all I love nature and believe in its power. So all [of] my pieces [have] its positive energy.” This is because all of her pieces are nature scenes. Nature scenes rendered in ecstatic, vibrant colors, finely detailed and often literally exploding up and out of the piece.
Each and every miniature embroidered needle painting of Shimunia’s is gorgeous and mind blowing in an “I can’t believe that’s possible” kind of way. My favorite element of her works, beyond just how vividly colorful and detailed they are, is the tactile sense one gets when looking at photos of them. When I look at the scenes, I just want to run my fingers along them to feel each and every thread and the clouds that burst up and out of the frames. My favorite example of this is a scene she did of a field of flowers at sunset. She creates a colorful stream of pink, orange, yellow and blue flowers that stretch back towards the horizon of the scenery. In the sky above, Shimunia recreates one of those magical sunsets where those same colors of the flowers temporarily reflect through the clouds, making them look like different flavors of cotton candy. In Shimunia’s embroidery, she builds that same effect of cotton candy clouds with layered tufts of yarn that flow up and out of the piece, at the viewer, an effect that’s simultaneously placid and stimulating. Everything she does feels like it was produced with actual magical powers. Her expertise deserves follows and perusal of her Etsy shop post haste.
