If Balloon Animals Were Real, This Artist Shows How They'd Be A Little Less Cute

If you were like most kids, you probably have a lovely memory of balloon animals. Your old balloon pal probably had a number of legs, maybe a tail, and something kind of like a head. Perhaps you were unsure what it was supposed to be, but chances are you liked it anyway. Unless, of course, it popped and freaked you out.
If you've always wondered exactly what the balloon animals handed out at parties and fairs are supposed to be, artist and designer Sarah DeRemer is here to fill in the blanks. DeRemer recently created some oddly realistic, and slightly unsettling, balloon animals of her own.

These aren't actual, physical balloons, so much as carefully designed digital illustrations.

Sarah Deremer

Each balloon animal is designed to have realistic "skin" and other features wrapped around it.

Sarah Deremer

This is so that the animal seems to bulge and twist with the latex, creating a strange hybrid creature that's at once realistic and abstract, natural and artificial.

Sarah Deremer

They could be inviting us to think about the distance humans have from the natural world and our desire to recreate it in sterile, unnatural ways for our own amusement...or maybe they're just funny.

Before turning her attention to art, design, and photography, DeRemer worked as a veterinary technician, and also studied at UC Davis Veterinary School.

Sarah Deremer

Her knowledge of animal anatomy is evident in her works, even as she distorts them for aesthetic interest.

These images are created using Photoshop, but they're realistic enough to make you imagine how they might have been twisted into shape, and where the air pockets form the bulges of faces and bodies.

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

DeRemer is also no stranger to combining imagery in a way that's at once humorous, logical, and disturbing. By carefully combining the elements, the images make sense visually, but the combinations themselves make the viewer do a double take when they realize what they're actually looking at, and it makes them consider the relationships between the two more carefully. An earlier series of DeRemer's saw the combinations of predatory animals and their prey.

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

Sarah Deremer

(via DesignBoom)
DeRemer's work focuses on blending unlikely elements together to create a strange, surreal new world that makes us reconsider the realities of our own. You can see more of DeRemer's artwork on her website, as well as on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram.