We recently learned women’s thighs can be used as premium ad space, but Boston-based film student Jodi Steel found a new intriguing use for her upper leg. She recently shot to internet fame after photos of her detailed thigh drawings went viral on popular news sharing site, Reddit.

Like many other bored students, Jodi Steel used to pass the time during boring school lectures by doodling, only instead of exercising her artistic talents on the back of her notebooks, she did it on her bare thighs. Despite having no kind of formal training as an illustrator, Jodi’s dermal masterpieces look like the work of a seasoned artist, a fact which she attributes to relentless practice, despite what everyone else may think. Her talents didn’t go unnoticed, and after seeing the artworks on her thigh one day, a teacher at Emerson College, in Boston, asked Jodi to draw the illustrations for a ‘steam punk’ book called Steaming into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology. She recently uploaded photos of her thigh drawings on Reddit, where some of them were actually mistaken for tattoos. Steel has since gotten multiple job offer from all around the world, but she doesn’t want to work full time as an illustrator, instead hoping to one day to concept art for films and paint on the side.

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Seattle-based designer Taras Lesko has spent the last few months building a nearly-life-size replica of the Lamborghini Aventador exclusively out of printing paper and cardboard.

We first featured Taras Lesko’s paper masterpieces back in 2010, shortly after he had completed his amazing 4-foot-tall Freedom Gundam. In 2011 he surprised us all again with an even more impressive 7-foot Gundam made with 1,250 distinct paper parts cut out of 720 pages. Taras took a two-year-long break after that, but he has recently unveiled his latest work of art, a stunning paper-and-cardboard replica of the Lamborghini Aventador sports car. Using his design skills, the Seattle-based artist created all the necessary parts in computer programs like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and AfterEffects, printed them on hundreds of sheets of paper and used a precise X-Acto knife to cut them loose. To make sure his paper Aventador was sturdy enough to move around, Lesko used thick chipboard as a frame for the ultra-light vehicle which weighs just 11.3 kilograms.

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Vietnamese artist Ben Tre uses his steady hands and a tiny dentist’s drill to carve detailed portraits and traditional landscapes on chicken eggshells. The exquisite artworks can be mounted on an LED-illuminated base and used as artistic lamps.

Ben Tre says he only started carving eggshells a year ago, yet each of his numerous works appear to have been executed by a seasoned master. He apparently experimented with a number of fine tools to get the desired effect, before borrowing a small electrical drill from a dentist friend, and has been using it ever since. Ben takes about a day to complete on of his amazing eggshell carvings, and specializes in both celebrity portraits and landscapes. The eggs aren’t chemically treated to harden the shell, which makes the artworks very vulnerable, but Ben offers interested clients the option of having the eggshell carvings encased in a glass globe for protection. An LED illuminated wooden base is also available to enhance the beauty of his fragile masterpieces.

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Using regular ballpoint pens, UK-based artist Gareth Edwards draws incredibly realistic portraits of celebrities like Audrey Hepburn, Walt Disney, Natalie Portman and Humphrey Bogart with Candy Toxton.

“I began working in ballpoint pen because I was to lazy to sharpen a pencil, or put away my paints at the end of the day,” Gareth Edwards explains the choice of his medium. “The simplicity of the ballpoint pen first appealed to me at school. The initial scribbles I did then, have since become an addiction in trying to create a drawing that is so realistic its deceives its audience into thinking such a detailed piece couldn’t have been created with such a humble source.” And indeed, some of his celebrity portraits look so life-like it’s almost impossible to believe they are more that just artistic black-and-white photographs.

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Paul Koudounaris, a history professor from California, has spent the last three years visiting ancient ossuaries and churches around Europe and photographing their macabre treasures. Among these are the Catacomb Saints, a series of jewel-encrusted skeletons said to be the remains of Christian saints.

Decorated with hundreds of precious stones and several pounds of gold and silver, the Catacomb Saints photographed by Mr. Koudounaris for his new book, Empire of Death, are skeletons dug up from Roman catacombs in the 16th century and installed in churches around Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the orders of the Vatican, to replace the sacred relics destroyed during the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s. Although none of them qualified as saints, authorities from the Vatican signed certificates identifying the dug-up skeletons as martyrs. The bones were packed in boxes and sent from Rome to various monasteries around central Europe, where nuns decorated them with gold and silver jewelry encrusted with precious stones. Since the skeletons were believe to be Christian martyrs, their bones couldn’t be handled by anybody, but only by those who had taken a sacred vow to the Church.  Once the decorative work was finished, the bejeweled remains were sent to churches and cathedrals where they reminded people of the spiritual treasures of the afterlife and acted as symbols of the Christian Church’s power in previously Protestant areas.

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Paper towel painting is a popular children’s learning activity, but American artist Ken Delmar is determined to turn it into a proper art form. For the last eight months, he has been using the flimsy kitchen disposables as canvases for detailed and vibrantly colored artworks.

71-year-old Ken Delmar has been painting most of his life, but he never imagined he would one day be exercising his artistic talents on paper towels instead of the linen canvas he normally used. The Connecticut-based artist had the epiphany one evening in early January of this year, while preparing to close his studio. He was using a paper towel to clean his brushes and knives when  he noticed the paint on the fragile paper looked more brilliant and energetic than the one he had spent so much time spreading on a regular canvas. He figured it was because the paint was being absorbed by the paper which gave it more depth and layers of richness, and started thinking of ways of ways to prevent the colors from blending into one another, or have them blend in an interesting way. He experimented with various paper towel brands and different consistency oil paints, until he found the perfect combination. The colors were astonishing and the unusual canvas made his works “edgy and different”.

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Two California couples, Jim and Mary Lambert of Carmichael, and Bob and Di Nelson of Fair Oaks, have spent the last three years making a life-size rhinoceros sculpture out of plywood, foam and 12,000 wine corks.

It all started one day, three years ago, when Mary told her husband Jim to take up a hobby. Instead of choosing a typical passtime like fishing or woodworking, Jim immediately thought of the thousands of wine corks he had been collecting for the past 20 years, and said ‘OK, I will build a giraffe out of corks.’ But then he realized giraffes are 20 feet tall and quickly changed his idea. “I said, ‘Mary, forget the giraffe, we’re going to build a rhinoceros,’ ” Lambert told the Sacramento Bee. Jim’s sole artistic experience was an art class he had taken back in college, but Bob Nelson and his wife Di, old friends of the Lamberts, were eager to jump on board as soon as they heard about the quirky project. They put up their garage as a work space, and Bob, who was an architect, started working on the frame of the artwork. Using an online photo of a rhinoceros as a guide for proportions and size, Nelson crafted the structural frame from plywood and added pieces of plastic foam to give it the appropriate shape. All that was left to do was cover the whole 12-foot-long sculpture with Jim’s wine corks.

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Latte art has become very popular in recent years, with more and more talented baristas using the fragile milk foam as a miniature canvas for their artworks, but Japan’s Kohei Matsuno is already taking the delicate art form to a whole new level with his amazing 3D latte masterpieces.

Kohei Matsuno used to work in an Osaka restaurant where he used latte art to surprise his clients. However, he noticed people are not so easily impressed with the usual designs on their cups of caffeinated beverages anymore, so he decided to step up his game. He had become an expert at creating traditional Japanese landscapes, popular manga characters and realistic portraits on milk foam, but he still felt restricted by the flat surface of his delicious canvas. To make things really interested he began using large amounts of milk foam to design all kinds of cute shapes, decorating them with with a sharp utensil, usually a toothpick. This ingenious trick has made Kohei one of the most popular latte artists in Japan. Using the alias “Mattsun”, the young barista now spends his days taking ideas from his fans and turning them into delicious reality.

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What if combining human and animal DNA wasn’t illegal, nor did it violate moral or ethical codes of conduct? What if technology allowed us to create hybrids between babies and pets that were still biologically bound to their parents but didn’t require a permanent responsibility and commitment? These are the questions Chinese artist Lingxizhu Meng tackles in her latest project, Baby-Pet.

Raising a child involves much more time and responsibility than owning a pet, which is why an increasing number of people are opting for the latter. Parents usually have to put their active lives on the back-burner in order to take care of a baby, but what if they didn’t have to? “The objective of this society’s endeavor is to create a new species that meets various needs. The result being something that is not your child but that is also not your pet. It serves as a combination of the purity that exists in both, the essence of affection one has when caring for a baby and the affection one receives when having a dog,” Lingxizhu describes her unique idea. “The animal human baby pet is a combination of baby and pet. Raising a child incurs significant financial costs, while pets in comparison are far more economical. Such as saving the cost of education, for example. The dogbaby life cycle is very short, similar to that of a dog, often only 11-­15 years of life. This is a circumstance that can enable elderly people to rise a dogba-by in the golden years of their lives. Some couples are not ready to ising a child. The dogbaby provides a link in their partnership without necessitating a permanent responsibility and commitment. Some singles who are occupied by an active social and work life but who have the desire to have a child find the benefit of a dogbaby’s growth process and need of attention levels much simpler to those of a child.”

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Scottish artist Douglas McDougall uses charcoal, sandpaper and scalpel blades to create his amazingly realistic portraits of friends and people he finds interesting.

Douglas McDougall learned how to draw as a child to pass the time while going in and out of hospitals with a blood disease. He spent countless hours in hospital wards trying to draw his surroundings, and the experience fueled his passion for art. In his younger years, the 50-year-old artist used to do a lot of pen and ink illustration work during the night, after coming home from his day job, but eventually settled on charcoal as his medium of choice. “The immediacy of applying that blackness and the way in which it’s sucked into a white ground /paper/ forever excited me with a glorious kick of absoluteness”, the artist says, and after getting his hands on Conté compressed charcoal for the first time and discovering its power there was no going back. Today he uses various kinds of charcoal along with unusual art tools like sandpaper and sharp blades to create some of the most detailed hyper-realistic portraits I have ever seen.

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Keisuke Yamada is a self-taught Japanese artist who takes plain bananas and turns them into edible masterpieces. Using only a spoon and toothpicks the talented food artist works against the clock, trying to finish his pieces before the fruit begins to oxidize.

Sculpting bananas is not easy. The fragile texture of the fruit and the fact that you can’t add more material to cover up a mistake like you would with clay makes it a very difficult material to work with. And that’s exactly what makes 26-year-old Keisuke Yamada’s art so special. It all began little over two ears ago when he peeled a banana and thought it would be interesting to carve something into it. His first creation was a simple smiling face, but he received such a positive reaction from art fans that he felt inspired to pursue the idea further. Using only a spoon to prime the banana by smoothing its surface and toothpicks for carving its flesh, Keisuke created an entire series of banana sculptures that won him international acclaim after the photos he uploaded to Japanese art site, Pixiv, went viral. In his interviews with some of the largest sites in the world, Yamada revealed he works as an electrician by day, and becomes an expert banana carver during the night. He described the artistic process as a race against time, trying to finish his creations in less than 30 minutes after the peeled banana has been exposed to air. Taking too long causes the fruit to turn brown ruining the whole piece. Once he’s finished, he quickly takes a photo after which he eats the banana.

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Many of Simon Hennessey’s paintings look so lifelike that they are often mistaken for photos. To achieve this level of realism, the English artist spends anywhere from two weeks to seven months on a single piece using an airbrush and acrylic paint.

40-year-old Simon Hennessey started painting landscapes reflected in the sunglasses of tourists in 2008. He had just finished painting a model wearing sunglasses and suddenly realized the reflection on the lenses allowed him to explore the spatial and environmental surroundings in a unique distorted and miniature fashion. From that moment on the popular accessory has become a predominant them in his hyper-realistic art. Simon has spent the last five years traveling to big cities like London and New York, taking photos of iconic landmarks reflected in the lenses of sunglasses worn by human models, which he uses as an inspiration for his art. He doesn’t just copy an entire photograph, but combines elements from multiple reference pictures, adding or removing certain details, altering textures and depth to produce original works of art. This allows him to create an illusion of reality different from that of his photographic sources, making his realistic paintings appear clearer and more distinct than any photo.

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Dinh Thong created his first chicken-feather painting right after finishing high-school, over three decades ago. He has dedicated his entire life to the unique art form, but has been unable to advertise his talents properly due to lack of funds.

Born and raised in the ancient city of Hoi An, Vietnamese artisan Dinh Thong has always been fascinated by folk art. He started using chicken feathers as an art medium during his middle school days, to make small souvenirs for his friends. During his mandatory military service, he decided to take his art to a whole new level by using the feathers to create large traditional paintings, and as soon as he returned home Dinh started scouring the local poultry markets for suitable material. At first, sellers let him pick whichever feathers he liked from their chickens, but after word spread that he was using them to create works of art, they assumed he was making a lot of money and began charging him. He was forced to cut his daily expenses so he could afford to buy the unusual art supplies, sometimes leaving his works unfinished for long periods of  time due to lack of feathers. To make matters worse, the bird flu epidemic that swept the planet a few years back kept his creations out of art galleries and forced the talented artisan to promote his works by word of mouth alone.

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Fifty years ago, Jerry Gretzinger started painting a map of a world that existed only in his imagination. It began as a doodle, but since that first day, he has been adding a new hand-drawn panel to his map every day. Today the masterpiece known as Jerry’s Map numbers 2,600 different unique panels that cover 2,000 square feet. And it’s still growing…

“The map began as just a doodle. I just made little rectangles and cross-hatched them carefully. And I just kept adding more rectangles and I put a river in and some railroad stations,” Gretzinger explains in a short documentary about his work. “But there was this moment when I came to the edge of that sheet of paper and got out another sheet of paper and I put the two together… That’s when I realized that it kind of had a life of its own.” He started out with a city that kept on growing, until he realized its imaginary population had to eat to survive, so he decided to throw in some farmland. He added rivers, forests, cemeteries, railroad stations, airports transforming small towns into cities as his universe evolved and keeping track of the population of each of his imaginary settlements on a computer spreadsheet. Even though it might seem like he is controlling everything that happens in Ukrainia, Plaeides and his other cities, Jerry has created a system that dictates almost everything that happens in his world.

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21-year-old Vincent Francisco Navarro, from Baguio City, Philippines, is an emerging visual artist who uses ground coffee as the main medium of his art. He collects used coffee grounds and recycles them as paint, thus giving the waste product new value and purpose through aesthetics.

The city of Baguio produces around 300 tons of garbage every day, and authorities are still looking for environment-friendly ways of storing and disposing of the waste. Local artist and environmentalist Vincent Navarro decided to do his part by proving recycling can be of great help against the build-up of garbage in an ingenious way. After doing extensive research he started exploring the possibility of creating beautiful works of art with coffee grounds collected from a large gourmet coffee chain. He spent ten months creating portraits of coffee farmers from the Benguet region of the Philippines, using nothing but coffee and used grounds. Inspired by the months his spent as a volunteer aiding coffee farmers in Benguet and Cordillera, Navarro created his works as tributes to the “toil and sweat” these hard-working people put into growing “the best-tasting and rich coffee beans”.

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