Woman Uses Power Washer to Turn Driveway into Artistic Canvas

A North Carolina woman who got a power washer for her birthday is using it to turn her concrete driveway into a canvas for ephemeral art, and draw a lot of attention online in the process.

Dianna Wood, a retired office worker from Burlington, North Carolina, had been wanting her own power washer ever since she used one to help one of her friend’s mother to get her hose ready for sale. She loved it so much that when her birthday came around, her husband knew exactly what to get her as a present. For over a month, she used it clan the patio, the dirty shutters, the fence around her home, and even the garbage cans. It was great, but by the time she got started on her concrete driveway, Dianna was already looking for way to spice things up. So instead of just cleaning the concrete, she decided to use the power washer to exercise her artistic talents.

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The Coffee-Painted Portraits of Nuria Salcedo

Nuria Salcedo is a self-taught artist who uses coffee to paint incredibly detailed illustrations and portraits of celebrities. While she also uses brown pencils for the most intricate parts of her artworks, her characters are always painted with various tones of coffee.

A trained architect, Nuria Salcedo never took art classes. She always liked drawing, but her skills are only the result of many hours of practice, her studying Architecture in school, and whatever tips she picked off online. the young Spanish artist was inspired to use coffee as a medium for her art after coming across the works of Maria A. Aristidou, another artist famous for her beautiful coffee paintings. She had been experimenting with many styles and mediums until then, but somehow coffee just seem to suit her best and she’s been painting with it ever since.

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Talented Artist Uses Single Thread to Create Incredibly Detailed Portraits

Hong Kong-based artist Alfred Chen takes a single thread of yarn over 5,000 meters long and weaves it around a frame made up of around 300 metal nails to create stunningly realistic celebrity portraits.

Chen starts the creative process by selecting a digital image he wants to recreate. He then changes the color version to grayscale, adjusting the brightness and contrast to better expose the shadows and highlights he will have to recreate with thread. Finally, he relies on an algorithm that tells him exactly how to weave a single thread around the 300 metal nails in order to recreate the picture in real life. Then the real work begins.

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Chinese Artist Creates Insanely Realistic Clay Busts of Passers-by

Yan Junhai, a talented street artist from the Chinese city of Changsha, in Hunan Province, has been getting a lot of attention online thanks to his ability to create detailed busts of passers-by in a mater of minutes.

Junhai recently rose to internet fame after a video of him working his magic on the streets of Changsha went viral on Chinese social media. Posted by CGTN, the short video shows him moulding pieces of clay into shockingly detailed busts of random people on the street. Yan Junhai only uses his bare hands and a fine clay sculpting knife, in  what seems like dim light, but the results of his work are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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The Photo-Realistic Charcoal-Drawn Portraits of Dylan Eakin

Looking at the expertly-drawn charcoal and graphite portraits of Dylan Eakin, you’d think he has a lifetime of experience and many years of art school under his belt, but the truth is he’s a self-taught artist and he’s only been at it for three years.

Staring at most of Eakin’s black-and-white portraits, I often found myself looking for any clues that I was looking at a drawing and not a high-definition photograph. That’s what hyperrealism is all about, I know, but the talented artist really takes it to the extreme, nailing even the finest of details, like loose strands of hair on his subjects’ faces, droplets of sweat or the smallest wrinkles. To the untrained eye, his works seem perfect, but he is the first to point out that there are some things he simply can’t replicate.

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Street Artist Creates Mind-Blowing Graffiti Optical Illusions

Portuguese street artist Vile has a gift that some would consider similar to a superpower – he can make concrete walls look transparent to the naked eye, using only cans of graffiti paint.

Rodrigo Miguel Sepulveda Nunes, aka Vile, started doing graffiti when he was 14 years old. In college he studied Cartoon and Animation Film and Drawing and Illustration, and in 2007 he started working as an independent artist. Vile has several remarkable paintings and portraits under his name, but graffiti always remained his biggest passion, and today he is better known as a street artist. Looking at some of his most impressive works, it’s easy to see why Vile is considered one of the world’s most talented graffiti artists.

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Artist Smashes Glass Panes with Chisel and Hammer to Create Stunning Artworks

Seen from up close, the creations of Swiss artist Simon Berger look more like vandalism, but take a few steps back and you’ll notice the cracks in the smashed glass panes form clear and complex portraits and images.

Berger admits that as an artist, he had the desire to be taken seriously, to attract attention, and the easiest way to do that was to use a material or a creative technique than no one had used before. The trained carpenter decided that laminated glass was not very popular as an artistic medium, so he started experimenting with it, developing an original technique that involved smashing the glass with hammer and chisel to create detailed and recognizable patterns. Having honed his skills, Simon Berger is now able to wield this wilful destruction to create stunning human portraits that are only visible from afar.

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Artist Puts On Astronaut Costume to Highlight Crater-Size Road Potholes

An Indian artist has come up with an ingenious and hilarious way of showcasing the poor state of roads in the city of Bangalore – he put on a realistic astronaut costume and filmed himself walking trough the craters that made a local road look like the surface of the moon.

Baadal Nanjundaswamy is well known for flagging civic issues like the poor condition of roads and large potholes through his stunning street art, but his latest project was by far his most popular one yet. To raise awareness about the pothole-filled Tunganagar Main Road in North Bangalore, the Indian artist dressed as an astronaut and had someone film him as he “moonwalked” through the large craters, while cars and rickshaws drove by. He then posted the hilarious video on social media, where it quickly went viral.

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Belorussian Artist Paints Better with Her Breasts Than Most People Do with Their Hands

Nadia Matievskaia, a self-taught artist from Belarus, has been making news headlines for her unusual “brush”. The young artist uses her breasts to paint, but you couldn’t tell by the details displayed in her artworks.

Nadia never trained to become a painter, in fact she dreamed of having a career in the music industry, but a year and a half ago she started taking acting lessons and discovered a hidden talent. The young artist says that the courses taught her not to be so constrained and explore her innermost feelings, but they also helped her experiment with her body and discover an unexpected way to make money. An assignment that one of her teachers gave her required her to create a painting using her breasts and try to sell it. She did exactly that, and she’s been doing it ever since.

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Self-taught Artist Uses Face Paint to Turn herself into Real-Life Manga Characters

When it comes to recreating the characters of Japanese horror manga artist Junji Ito in real life, there’s no one better for the job than dedicated fan Mamakiteru.

Mamakiteru’s Twitter bio reads “I want to live in the world of Junji Ito”, and since living in the artist’s manga is impossible, she decided to do the next best thing – bring Ito’s characters into the real world, using face paint and a bit of digital editing. Most of her work involves expertly applying makeup to turn herself into almost perfect renditions of Junji Ito manga characters, with digital editing only being used to recreate surreal images which could not otherwise exist in our world. She’s been at it for four years now, and has amassed quite a following on social media.

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Russian Couple Create the Most Amazing Human-Like Dolls

Anastasiya and Sergey Lutsenko, a couple of talented artists from the Russian City of Krasnoyarsk, are famous among doll collectors all around the globe as two of the world’s most meticulous doll makers. They can spend several months on a single piece, but it is this attention to details that makes the final product so impressive.

To say that the Lutsenkos’ dolls look like tiny human beings is not that much of an exaggeration. With their shiny, little eyes, perfectly proportionate faces and carefully painted details like freckles and moles,  these dolls that are so realistic they often look like miniature people. To add to the realism, no two dolls are the same. They are all hand-made and hand-painted, plus they are all highly customizable, with the owners being able to change both their clothes and accessories, as well as the natural wigs.

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Portuguese Street Artist Creates Mind-Blowing Graffiti Illusions

Portuguese street artist Odeith is widely considered the pioneer of anamorphic graffiti, and looking at his latest works, many would say he is still ahead of the curve.

Seen from all but the perfect angle, Odeith’s anamorphic masterpieces look strange and distorted, but when properly aligned with the artwork viewers are treated to larger-than-life creations that seem ready to leap off of their concrete canvas. Take the artist’s latest project, a realistic-looking wrecked bus spray-painted on a giant concrete block. Unless you saw the “before” photo, you could swear that was a real bus.

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Former Boxing Champion Turned Pastry Chef Creates the Most Amazing Wedding Cakes

Once a Russian boxing champion, Renat Agzamov is now known as a celebrity cake maker specializing in elaborate, edible masterpieces that sell for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A self-described workaholic, Renat Agzamov baked his first cake when he was only seven-years old and claims to have since created over 2,700 cakes, constantly trying to improve his skills and surpass clients’ expectations. Despite dedicating much of his youth to sports and becoming a boxing champion in his native Russia, the talented food artist says that cooking in general and cake making in particular have always been his greatest passions. Today, he is one of the world’s most sought-after cake artisans, creating incredibly complex wedding cakes for high-profile clients all around the world.

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Artist Turns Tree Logs into Ultra-Realistic Animals Sculptures

You’ve probably seen wood artists carve impressive sculptures out of giant logs, be it with a chainsaw or hammer and chisel, but you probably haven’t seen anything quite like what Spanish artist Gerard Mas is capable of.

By tirelessly chiselling away at logs cut from mature tree trunks then smoothing out his artworks with fine sandpaper, Gerard Mas is able to produce these almost perfect animal sculptures that literally look like photos of living creatures. And as if his works weren’t impressive enough, the dark tones used to expertly recreate the fur of a doberman or the black snout of a German shepherd are achieved only by charring the wood with an open flame. The results are simply breathtaking.

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The Book That Grew – A Unique Book Grown By Manipulating Grass Roots

In an effort to promote sustainable agriculture, Irish as agency Rothco teamed up with German artist Diana Scherer to create The Book That Grew – a 22-page tome created by manipulating the roots of living plants to grow in the shape of letters and diagrams.

We wrote about plant root manipulation for artistic purposes in the past, but this is probably the most ambitious and impressive such project we’ve ever come across. All elements of The Book That Grew, including the ink and binding, were made from grass to show farmer just how powerful a resource it can be, when managed properly. That’s actually the main point of the book, which contains 10 simple yet valuable lessons designed to help maximize sustainability of one of the most valuable agricultural resources, grass. And what better to convey the message to farmers than in the form of an all-organic book grown from that very grass.

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