Hand-made silk embroidery is a long-standing tradition in Vietnam, but the craft only recently reached its peak, when two artists – an embroider and a painter – decided to combine their skills and found the country’s most successful hand embroidery studio.

XQ Dalat was founded by Hoang Le Xuan, a talented artisan who inherited ancient embroidery techniques from her family, and her husband, painter Vo Van Quan. Together they came up with the concept of embroidered paintings and came up with new techniques to make it a reality. The unprecedented level of realism and detail displayed in the embroidered masterpieces of XQ Dalat catapulted the small family business to national and later, international success. Today, the company employs over 3,000 talented embroiders and caters to clients from all over the world.

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Sarina Nexie has made a name for herself as a true makeup artist, by using her face as a canvas for some incredibly detailed artworks.

The community of makeup artists on Instagram is growing every day, but there are some gems on there that are truly worth the attention of millions of people. We’ve already covered makeup legends like Mimi Choi and Dain Yoon, and today we’re taking a look at another rising star carving her own path not with mind-boggling makeup illusions, but with thought-provoking and downright impressive face paintings.

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If you suffer from shy bladder syndrome, good luck using the bathroom at this Lithuanian restaurant, which makes you feel like you’re being watched by dozens of people.

The bathroom at Galeria Urbana, a restaurant in Kaunas, Lithuania, first made news headlines in 2018, when photos of its unique décor went viral online. The restaurant commissioned Gyva Grafika, a creative design and décor studio, to artistically redecorate the restroom, but made it very clear that they did not feel comfortable replacing the wall tiles. That didn’t stop the creative geniuses at Gyva Grafika from implementing their vision, even if it meant thinking outside the box.

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Michelle Nguyen is a talented sugar flower artist whose creations are so insanely realistic that you can hardly tell them apart from the real thing.

Melbourne-based Michelle Nguyen is one of the world’s leading sugar flower artists, and looking at her portfolio, it’s easy to see why. From the life-like sugar petals, to the stunningly-detailed leaves, and the perfect color, there’s nothing separating her edible flowers from the actual plants that inspired them. Nguyen’s artworks are so impressive that she is constantly traveling the world attending events and teaching her craft to students wanting to master the art of making sugar flowers.

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Sally Magdy Murad, is a young Egyptian artist who has adopted some rather unusual mediums to express her talents. She creates portraits of iconic Arab personalities using things like honey, chocolate, syrup and more.

While most of us were spending lockdowns binging on Netflix or just losing our minds from boredom, Egyptian artist Sally Magdy was experimenting with new ways to put her talents on display. During the long quarantine periods of last year, the 25-year-old started inventing her own painting tools for use with some special paints – honey, syrup, chocolate, jams, pomegranate juice, and more. As she experimented, Sally came up with new mediums to try, and her art gradually became more complex.

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It’s hard to believe, but the bag of potato chips you’re looking at right now isn’t real, it’s just an expertly drawn optical illusion.

Twitter user Shinoo (@ Shinoo_0215) has been getting a lot of attention this week thanks to his incredibly detailed color pencil drawings. Actually, calling his artworks “detailed” is a bit of an understatement, considering how life-like they look. Take the bag of potato chips bellow, if you didn’t know it was only a drawing, could you tell it apart from an actual, three-dimensional bag? Heck, I know it’s a drawing and I still can’t believe it.

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A talented art and design student recently stunned Japanese social media with his collection of delicious-looking sushi made exclusively of stone.

Hama, a student of the Joshibi University of Art and Design, in Kanagawa, Japan, has been exhibiting his stunning stone sushi at various universities across his country, to great success. And it’s easy to see why; his work is absolutely amazing, with some bite-sized pieces looking so realistic that you can hardly tell them apart from the real thing.

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An impressive trompe-l-oeil fresco painted in the coastal city of Boulogne-Sur-Mer was recently crowned France’s most beautiful street artwork for 2020.

Every year, a popular French portal dedicated to urban art hosts a national competition to crown the nation’s most impressive street art. Thousands of votes are cast, and for last year, the title went to an amazing artwork created by Spanish street artist Gonzalo Borondo, on the city’s rue Jules Baudelocque, last summer. From the right angle, it looks like an elaborate metal gate, with detailed bas-reliefs on either side, but a closer look reveals it to be just an optical illusion.

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If you’ve ever used a pencil, you know how brittle and delicate the pencil lead is. Somehow, Japanese artist Shiroi is able to carve that fragile material into stunningly detailed micro-artworks.

Mr. Shiroi (@shir0003) took up pencil lead carving seven years ago, after watching a segment on renowned Japanese pencil carver Toshiyuki Yamazaki on TV. He was blown away by the level of detail the master lead carver could achieve, and decided to give it a try for himself. As you can imagine, simply keeping his hand steady enough to keep from breaking the fragile lead was a huge challenge in the beginning, but he kept at it. Today, Shiroi is a pencil lead carving master in his own right.

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Italian artist Roberto Rizzo turns bland river stones into incredibly detailed artworks inspired by the animal kingdom. From mammals like cats and dogs, to birds and fish, there is almost no creature that Rizzo can’t turn a stone into.

Roberto Rizzo has always believed that stones have a soul, and using his mind’s eye and his talent as a painter, he has been able to turn stones into living artworks of sorts, by turning them into photo-realistic animals. He has been creating his beautiful painted stones since 1996, and is an expert at hunting for special stones that can be used as canvases for his art.

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Gesine Marwedel is a talented body-painting artist who has the power to transform the naked bodies of her models into mind-bending optical illusions.

From swans, to owls, to dolphins, there doesn’t seem to be anything that German artist Gesine Marwedel can’t morph her models into, using body paint. But while most of her works are illusory in nature, obscuring parts of the human body, while transforming others into something new entirely, some are simply abstract works of art, with a deeper meaning.

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Young Serbian artist Sanja Jankovic creates beautiful paintings by using various types of wine – red, white, rosé – instead of oil paint, watercolors or acrylics.

Sanja Jankovic has always tried turning things into art mediums, and after giving wine a go, she stuck with it. Not only did the end result look really cool, but the challenge of painting with wine was itself exciting. The talented artist was now limited to tones of red, pink and purple, but that only made things more interesting. The art form, which Jankovic has named “winerelle”, a play on ‘wine’ and ‘aquarelle’, is very unpredictable, as the wine continues to age on the canvas, so the artworks themselves develop over time.

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Mary Kenyon, a self-taught artist from California transforms real seashells into stunningly-beautiful jewels that have this very vintage charm to them.

A self-confessed “crafts addict”, Mary Kenyon inherited her passion for arts and crafts from her father, who was a talented oil painter. They did a lot of different things together, from painting to leather carving, and after he passed away, Mary inherited his workshop and was inspired to use all those tools and supplies to come up with a whole new art form.

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A very patient Vietnamese artist spent three years meticulously drilling a whopping 45,863 holes smaller than a human hair into a hollowed-out ostrich egg.

Nguyen Hung Cuong, a talented artist from Hanoi, Vietnam, has been turning chicken eggs into intricate works of art for over a decade, but his most recent project is by far his most impressive yet. The 30-year-old reportedly spent the last three years of his life carefully drilling tens of thousands of holes, some only 0.2 mm in diameter, to create one of the most impressive egg carving in human history.

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Kaisefu Mudazono is a self-taught food artist who uses all sorts of ingredients, from dried seaweed and pickled vegetables, to ham and rice, to create the most amazing edible artworks.

When it comes to food art, it’s hard to find something more adorable, and at the same time impressive, than  kyaraben (or Charaben), the Japanese art form of arranging various foods to create eye-catching designs. When done right, kyaraben turns out almost too good to eat, and Kaisefu Mudazono is definitely a master at it. Whether expressing her creative talent on a bento box, or on her grandchildren’s bowls, she always manages to impress.

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