Using only human hair and glue, Seattle-based artist Adrienne Antonson creates realistic insects that are both beautiful and creepy, at the same time.

“Inspired by the bizarre behaviors and ingenious evolutionary developments of the insect world”, Adrienne chose hair as the perfect medium for her little bugs. She has always been fascinated by its historical implications and various uses across man’s history, and as a person interested in sustainable and self-supporting systems, she decided it was perfect for the job. Obviously, the whole attraction/repulsion theme was also very intriguing.

Adrienne doesn’t use any hair to create her intricate insects, she only uses her own and the hair of her close friends and family. This way the meticulous process of creating hair insects becomes much more intimate and makes her feel like she’s connected to her close ones, through her work.

Though it may not appear so, the artist only uses human hair and glue to create her impressive insects, but a look through the magnifying glass reveals their complexity and the amount of work she puts into every one of her bugs. Some of them look so real you’re just waiting for them to jump of fly off, while some are clear figments of her imagination, but all of Adrienne’s hair insects are equally fascinating.

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Terje Isungset, one of the world’s most talented percussionists, creates ice music with instruments he carves out of pure glacier ice.

Born in the Norwegian village of Geilo, Isungset grew up surrounded by a family of musicians, and grew up to be one of the most innovative percussionists of our time, Over the years, he has created musical instruments out of natural materials like arctic birch, granite, slate, but the thing he is most passionate about is making ice music, a style that he pioneered through the creation of ice instruments.

Isungset first fell in love with ice music in the year 2000, when the commission for the Lillehammer Winter Olympic Games asked him to compose and play in a frozen waterfall. He was already renown for creating musical instruments out of other primitive materials, but he had never worked with ice. He took it as a challenge and managed to compose a greatly appreciated minimalist composition with just whatever the river provided – ice, water, stone and some wood.

Terje Isungset describes the process of making ice music and ice instruments as hard work and a continuing learning process. Most of his tools are made of pure glacier ice, so clear you can see through meters of it. He just cuts the ice cubes with a knife and carves them into instruments. Most of his creations are percussion tools, but he has been known to make an ice guitar, an ice harp, a trumpet and even a fiddle.

While Terje Isungset’s ice music can’t exactly be referred to as radically new (considering man actually started making using with whatever materials nature provided him with), it’s definitely a breath of fresh air, in this modern age.

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Jim Woodring, creator of a series of popular comic books, has unveiled a seven-foot-long pen that actually works.

The recently finished writing tool, dubbed “Nibbus Maximus” was recently showcased at the Gage Academy of Art, in Seattle, in front of over one hundred people. Considering this was practically the first time he used the Nibbus Maximus, apart from a few tests he did with the nib, he handled it pretty well and managed to both write and draw with it.

While attaching a 1 1/2 foot-long nib to a 5 1/2 foot-long wooden handle may not seem very difficult to do, there’s a reason most people thought it couldn’t be done. Jim put a lot of effort into making the tip of his giant pen, especially getting the surface tension just right, so it holds the ink and releases it on paper, properly. Eventually, his beautiful hand-engraved, brass-plated steel nib did just what it was designed to do.

But why go through the trouble of making a giant tool, like the Nibbus Maximus, right? Well, because people said it couldn’t be done and Jim Woodring knew that it could, so he just had to prove it to everybody.

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Damien Hirst‘s latest artwork, a baby’s skull cast in platinum and encrusted with 8,000 diamonds, has caused quite an outrage among parenting groups who think it’s offensive and deeply disturbing.

Hirst has made quite a name for himself, as a controversial artist who has previously dissected sheep and pickled a shark and showed them off as artworks. As disgusting as this sounds, it earned him an international reputation and a multi-million dollar fortune. But some say the bad boy of the art world has gone a little to far with his latest creation, “For Heaven’s Sake”.

He took a baby skull from a 19th century pathology collection he acquired, made a platinum cast and encrusted it with 8,000 diamonds. The piece is the centerpiece of a new exhibition scheduled to open later this month, in Hong Kong, but it has already made headlines, after parenting groups labeled it as troubling. “Mr Hirst may not have intended to be insensitive with his new work, but the fact is it will have a profound effect on many people who will find the subject deeply disturbing.” said Sally Russell, founder of the Netmums parenting group.

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American artist Chris Cole uses scrap metal parts to explore the border between nature and industry, by creating unique mechanical creatures.

As a young boy, Chris grew up in the American Northwest, surrounded by an abundance of wildlife that later influenced his art. At the same time, he always had a passion for all things mechanical, and would often take stuff apart, only to put them back together in a radical new way. Nowadays, he creates moving creatures, especially from the avian and aquatic reigns, from various scrap metal parts, connected by heavy bolts and operated by bicycle chains and small motors.

While he is still fascinated by machinery, and was greatly influenced by the visionaries of the industrial revolution, Chris Cole is very concerned with man’s “disconnection with the natural world”, and his work represents a “regression  from mechanism back to organism.”

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One of the most controversial artist of our time, Viktor Mitic paints his artworks with semi-automatic rifles, hand-guns and shotguns.

Although he was acquainted with firearms from the time he spent in the National Service for the Serbian Army, in the former Yugoslavia, Viktor Mitic first got the idea of using guns in his art, after an art critic said his art needs to be more penetrating. Then, just before the war in Afghanistan started, he saw a report on a military group who destroyed 2,000-year-old statues of Buddha. ‘I wanted to use similar energy. The weapons had been around for a number of years, but no one has used them to paint with yet. I wanted to use it as a tool of creation, rather than of destruction’ Mitic says.

His bullet hole paintings include a replica of Picasso’s Gurnica, as well as portraits of popular figures the likes of JFK, Marylin Monroe, John Wayne, John Lennon and many others.

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Margarita Mileva, an architect working in New York City, is taking the fashion world by storm with her unique dresses made from thousands of rubber bands.

Margarita first captured the attention of the fashion world with her line of rubber band accessories – M2, an offshoot of Milev Architects. The daughter of two artists took things to a whole new level, back in September 2010, when she showcased her first rubber band dress, a beautiful cocktail frock, made entirely from differently colored rubber bands.

Her latest creation, the “RB Dress“, was originally created for “Wear Is Art”, a design competition in Berlin, but it continued to attract attention even after the contest ended. Milev constructed the dress by hand, painstakingly weaving an astounding 14, 235 rubber bands into an haute-couture gown. That’s approximately 4 kilograms of rubber bands.

The practicing architect/fashion designer says she was inspired by the works of German-Swiss painter Klee and the early Bauhaus pioneers: “I was intrigued by the pastel colors used together with the black, darker ones; the black outlines and texture-like “fabric” of his (Klee’s) works. For me also of utmost importance is color theory, which he developed and taught to Bauhaus students.”

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Florida based graphic-designer Derek Gores takes old magazines, labels and other materials and recycles them into impressive collage artworks. The artist hand rips the magazines, maps or schematics and puts them together randomly to create impressive collages focused mostly on women and female fashion.

Here’s what Derek Gores has to say about his collage art: ‘I like my pictures to barely come together with teasing little details. Sort of like how the mind can’t help but wander, even when trying to focus on one thing. In the collages, some of the little bits I use are deliberate, but in most I’m trusting randomness to help build an end result more interesting than I could have planned. One friend calls it a Zen Narrative’.

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Jimmy Tomczak, a young entrepreneur from Michigan, is taking the footwear world by storm, with his original line of shoes made from recycled billboards, Paper Feet.

Jimmy says he’s an outdoors guy who likes to walk barefoot as much as possible, but he always felt like he needed something to protect his soles from the hot asphalt. So, one day, he decided to create some sort of revolutionary footwear that had to be tear resistant, waterproof and light enough to make people feel like they were actually barefoot.

The first thing he tried was Tyvek, a material mostly used on FedEx envelopes, but even though it was puncture-proof and waterproof, it was way too thin for footwear. But when someone suggested he use an old billboard as tarp for his leaky roof, Mr. Tomczak knew he had found the material he was looking for. Billboards are five times as thick as shower curtains, and just light enough for his revolutionary “foot condoms”

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They might look like common oil paintings, to the untrained eye, but these are actually edible masterpieces created with chocolate and food coloring, by artist Jean Zaun.

57-year-old Jean Zaun has always had a passion for oil painting, but working in her family’s chocolate shop, in downtown Lebanon, Pensylvania, she started getting bored and started experimenting with chocolate as an art medium. “I was literally ‘stuck’ in a puddle of chocolate eight hours a day. This was a coping mechanism to alleviate the boredom of being a candy coater and also remind myself that I was an artist” Jean says about her beginnings as a chocolate painter.

After 22 years of working in a chocolate shop, Jean Zaun has now dedicated herself completely to painting in oil, pastels and chocolate. Using white, dark and milk chocolate, food coloring, sugars and confectionery glaze, she is able to reproduce famous paintings like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Vincent Van Gogh’s Self Portrait, or Edvard Munch’s The Scream, as well as create her own original works. Mrs  Zaun works up to five days on a single painting, after which she encases it in a chocolate frame and covers it with a special glaze.

Although they are made from the world’s most popular sweet, Jean Zaun says her chocolate paintings are to be consumed by the eye, not the stomach. “They are works of art in their own right and are to be kept and cherished as keepsakes”, she adds. That’s easier said than done, especially when you have a sweet tooth and a chocolate painting is the only sugary delight in the house.

Her works have sold for up to $1,440, and they can be found in the private collections of people like Sharon Osbourne or Al Roker, as well as in museums across America.

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The anime icon that inspired franchises like Star Wars and Battleship Galactica has just been recreated out of hundreds of Zen Magnets.

To celebrate the launch of the “Space Battleship Yamato” movie, in December of 2010, a fan of the anime classic created a replica of the famous battleship out of Zen magnets and a few nails. It’s not exactly clear how many  of them tend2it used, but I’m sure it was a pretty tough job, considering the limitations of magnetic balls. He admits this is his toughest work yet, and that he had to improvise in order to give his creation a more realistic look. For example, he couldn’t get the Zen magnets to look like turrets and tower spines, so he used various sized nails and paper clips.

Check out more photos of the Zen magnet Space Battleship Yamato, on tend2it’s Flickr stream.

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Goldenhen, and Australian art studio, used hundreds of recycled egg cartons to build a colorful house called ” The Original Dream”.

If you liked Eggcubism and are looking for other cool ways of recycling egg cartons, you’re going to love Goldenhen’s project. They built a simple wooden frame, painted the egg cartons in different colors and then simply stacked them in the shape of a house. But it’s not just any house, it’s modeled after Howard Arkley’s famous painting, “Family Home Suburban Exterior 1993” – a symbol of the Australian dream of suburban living.

Apart from the actual house, Goldenhen also built a brick yard fence, an outdoor clothes drying rack and lots of grass, all made of egg trays.

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Sand sculptor Jamie Wardley transforms beaches into canvases for his art, as he tries to send important messages through his giant sand drawings.

Jamie first came into contact with the world of sand sculpting, as a young boy, on a trip in Norway. He met a sand sculptor who managed to turn two sand blocks into The Queen and Mr. Bean, in just a few hours, and Jamie was amazed by his talent, so he started asking the master all kinds of questions about his art. One thing led to another and before he knew it, the young boy had sand carving tools in each of his hands and was working on his very first sculpture. The sand sculptor was very impressed with his work, and told Jamie he could attend some of his classes, if ever returned to Norway.

It was years before Jamie Wardley contacted the talented sculptor, but when he did, he was welcomed back to the land of fjords, to start his apprenticeship as a sand sculptor. Along the way, the young Brit started making ice sculptures as well as impressive sand drawings, and now he’s one of the world’s most famous beach artists in the world.

Basically, Jamie and his team create these spectacular sand drawings by raking the sand while coordinating themselves perfectly, but he admits there are some trade secrets he only reveals during workshops. He and his team at “Sand in Your Eyes” create incredibly detailed sand drawings, up to 800 meters large. While they only last a few hours, before the tide sweeps over them, Jamie’s works can clearly be seen from the air and on the ground, during this short period of time.

Jamie Wardley’s company creates commercial sand drawings, like for companies who want to promote their products, but also takes interest in preserving the environment, and honoring history. Over the years they’ve created various sand drawings in protest to global warming and pollution.

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Seattle based artist Casey Curran creates some of the most interesting artworks I’ve ever seen – kinetic installations that look like they belong in a fantasy world. Feathers, artificial flowers and wire-made shapes are all controlled by a simple crank, located at the bottom, and it takes just a few strokes of the hand to set in motion a small unique world.

Truth is words and photos just don’t do these artworks justice, so make sure you see them in action in the videos, after the jump.

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Denis Peterson is a New York based artist of Armenian descent known around the world for his incredible photorealist artworks.

A few weeks back, I posted some incredible artworks by Tom Martin, and I started looking up more hyper-realist artist. That’s how I first found out about Denis Peterson and his mind-blowing paintings. Widely regraded as the father of hyperrealism, Peterson has exhibited his creations in galleries across the world, from the US, to Italy or France.

Denis Peterson starts the creation process by taking a photo of his subject or scenery, magnifies it up 1 – 2000 times, to capture every small detail, and begins painting. As you can imagine, this kind of painting takes a while to complete – around a month, to be exact – but the artist’s efforts are well compensated, as he receives around $46,000 for each of his artworks.

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