Artist Michael Grab is a master of rock balancing – he can pile them up in all sorts of gravity-defying formations, and believe it or not, there’s no glue involved.
Michael calls his art a ‘contemplative stone arrangement’ that involves ‘patience, adaptation, slow-breathing, steady hands and a plethora of other practiced skills’. His project, called ‘Gravity Glue’, has him balancing rocks of all shapes and capturing the impossible-looking structures on camera.
Hollywood artist Jon Neill’s pumpkin carvings are so scary they might just give you nightmares this Halloween. The big, wrinkly faces and mouths full of crooked teeth are so life-like and rich in detail that it’s hard to believe they’re actually made of plain old pumpkins.
Neill, originally from Kansas City, has been carving pumpkins ever since he was a boy. His family used to grow them, and over the years, his traditional jack-o-lanterns morphed into creepy works of art. But his skills didn’t receive recognition until a few years ago, when the San Fernando Valley resident turned pro. He auditioned for the TV show Halloween Wars as a pumpkin artist, for which he made a few time-lapse videos of himself at work. When one of those videos was put up on YouTube, it started to receive thousands of hits, and he soon became known as one of the world’s best pumpkin carving artists.
Apparently, there’s much more to a pink flower than meets the eye – there’s also gold, orange, yellow, purple, blue and red.How do we know this? Well, it’s all thanks to tetrachromats like Concetta Antico. Her unique condition enables her to see 100 times more color than the average person.
“My world speaks to me very strongly and then I can’t wait to paint it,” said Concetta, an artist based in San Diego. “I’ve been told that you see gray, mostly, in a shadow. Well, shadows are fabulous. I see emerald greens, I see magentas, I see lilacs, I see blues.”
The reason for Concetta’s amazing ability to see the world from a different perspective is the extra receptors in her eyes. Most people have three types of cones – structures in the eye that are designed to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain – in their eyes. But tetrachromats like Concetta have four cones, so while the average person can only see 1 million colors, they can potentially view 99 million!
You can say Chinese artist Han Xiaoming has great ‘taste’ in art – he actually uses his tongue as a brush to create paintings! Luckily, he doesn’t use oil paints or acrylic, just sweetened food dye.
Han, 35, claims he came up with the technique while trying his hand at traditional Chinese sugar painting. The ancient art form involves the use of melted sugar to create figures such as dragons, monkeys, fish, dogs, birds and flowers. Halfway through his work, however, sweet-toothed Han got hungry and decided to take a sip of the sugary paints used to paint the sugar artworks. He loved the taste so much that he finally ended up abandoning the paintbrush and continued to paint with his tongue. Eventually, he completely switched to using his tongue as a tool for his art.
Lucia Pittalis, an Italian makeup artist and portrait painter, is a master of disguise – she can give herself a whole new identity with just a few strokes of makeup. All she needs are a few cosmetics, makeup tools, and wigs. The 43-year-old mostly chooses to turn herself into famous musicians, actors and fictional characters – both male and female.
Some of Lucia’s most epic transformations have been into iconic figures such as Marlon Brando, Walter White, and Bette Davis. She has also morphed into pop icons like Iggy Azalea, and movie characters like Rambo, Rocky, and Don Vito Corleone.
Artist Jordan Mang-osan is a master of pyrography – an incredibly rare and beautiful artform that involves decorating slabs of wood with burn marks. While most other pyrography artists prefer to use specialized tools, Jordan prefers to harness the power of the sun with the help of a magnifying glass. Jordan uses the special technique to create beautiful landscapes and portraits on wood.
To create a piece, he starts off by sketching a design on to a piece of wood. He then uses a magnifying glass to concentrate solar heat on selected areas of the artwork. The heat etches permanent darkened lines into the wood, so intricate that it’s hard to imagine the artist’s hands never really touch the wooden canvas. The work is tedious, however – it takes several months of dedicated effort to manipulate the sun’s rays and etch each detail of the complex pieces.
Ban Hun Lek is a Thai scrap metal art company that makes amazing pop culture sculptures from discarded auto parts. One of their best works is this Incredible Hulk statue made almost entirely out of rusty old nuts and bolts.
According to the brand’s website, Ban Hun Lek is a family-run business, specializing in hand-made scrap metal art that’s created piece-by-piece from used auto parts that have no value. “Bolts, nuts, screws, spark plugs, and other used auto parts have been re-created by our skillful welders with just a normal electric welding technique,” they wrote. “These art would make great gifts, and are great for collection and decoration.”
Singaporean artist Ivan Hoo is an ace at creating optical illusions. Using pastels and pencils on wood, he illustrates highly realistic objects such as spilled cola, cracked eggs, broken vases and crumpled paper. It all looks three-dimensional until you touch it and realise that it’s not.
Ivan said that he chose to work with wood because of its texture and the way it holds color. “By working on wood, it gives me a lot of dimension and ideas to create something close to reality and it works really well with pastels too,” he explained.
“I started to experiment on wood some years back with mainly portraits as my subject before going further with a different concept,” he added. “I started to think of ideas and draw things that we could see ‘happening’ on a piece of wood, so the very first idea that struck me was the dripping effect. That was my first anamorphic work.”
Peter Combe is a San Francisco-based visual artist who specializes in creating three-dimensional artwork using nothing but paint swatches, hand-punched into small disks. Using his special technique, Combe creates stunning pieces that range from abstract pattern-based compositions to highly realistic pixelated portraits with a vintage photograph-like quality.
Combe has a huge collection of paint swatch disks of over 1,100 colors that he has organized based on tonal increments and light-reflecting values. This enables him to think of tones rather than colors while working. To create a piece, he fits these disks into bezel-cut grooves on a specially prepared archival material, with the aid of a vintage operating-theater lamp.
To pay tribute to Serbian inventor and electrical engineering genius Nikola Tesla, artist Phil Hansen recently created a portrait of him using only electric sparks.
A time lapse video of Hansen creating the painting shows him connecting a couple of wires to a large battery. He then brings the two naked ends of the wire together to produce sparks. He uses the sparks to create burn marks of varying darkness on paper, creating the eyes, nose and other features of Tesla’s face until the mind-blowing portrait is complete.
While most graphic designers use high-tech software to create images, Álvaro Franca has chosen to return to the basics. Using a vintage typewriter, he creates incredibly detailed portraits of his favorite authors.
Franca begins the process by creating a reference image on his computer. This allows him to plan out the areas of light and dark shading on the portrait. Once the reference is ready, he uses it as a guide and proceeds to choose the letters and the number of strikes he needs to achieve the desired level of darkness.
Satoshi Araki, an artist from Tokyo, creates highly realistic miniature models of towns, vehicles, and a lot of other objects from everyday life. He is particularly skilled at making small-scale dioramas of chaotic cityscapes that are affected by urban decay, pollution, or warfare.
Satoshi mostly uses styrofoam board to make these incredibly intricate and complex models – he cuts them down to the desired shape and size, paints them, and then glues them together. He explains on his blog that he uses Google Image Search to pull up images that he later uses as a visual reference. These images help him create scenes that are very life-like, down to the smallest detail.
Xu Shuquan, a retired primary school teacher from Chengdu city in Sichuan Province, has dedicated the past 60 years to folding paper planes. The 70-year-old now has a collection of 10,000 planes of different sizes, colors and shapes, in addition to various paper dolls and models of the 12 zodiac signs.
What’s so great about a grown man making paper planes, you ask? Well, Xu’s planes aren’t like those simple ones that kids make. He uses a complicated ancient origami-like folding technique called ‘Zhezhi’ to make a variety of aircraft models – from jumbo jets to fighter planes.
Who knew that a child’s meaningless doodles could have so much potential? Toronto-based artist Ruth Oosterman takes creativity to a whole new level by converting her two-year-old daughter Eve’s scribbles into beautiful paintings.
Ruth is so artistic that she is able to transform Eve’s random lines into recognizable shapes. A random curve becomes an elephant’s ear, and crooked lines become the gnarled branches of a tree. Nothing seems to escape her eye – she can spot the outline of a woman’s face or the hooked nose of a bird where most people would just see haphazard scratches.
It all started by accident when Eve discovered her mother’s ink pen and loved using it. “That was part of the reason I used watercolor on that very first drawing because I knew the beautiful effect it would have on the paper. The ink pen marks immediately become a type of paint once you touch it with a wet paintbrush. It makes it easier to blend into the colors I add and also adds a dark intensity that I wouldn’t be able to create otherwise.”
The paintings of Mexican artist Cristiam Ramos are, quite literally, like a breath of minty fresh air! The 34-year-old creates celebrity portraits using nothing but tubes of ordinary toothpaste. Some of his notable works include paintings of Robin Williams, Miley Cyrus, Emma Watson, Lady Gaga and Sir Elton John. They’ve all been crafted using various brands of the oral hygiene product.
Painting with toothpaste is a lot harder than it sounds, and Ramos spends up to 200 hours and 30 tubes on a single piece. “It is very difficult to make these as the toothpaste becomes very sticky and dries quickly,” he explained. “The smell can also be overwhelming, which was challenging during the long days of up to 10 hours painting.”
