Measuring nearly 30 square meters, The Awakening mosaic recently unveiled in Gorky Park, Moscow, set a new world record for the largest coffee bean mosaic.

It’s not very often that you get to see artworks as impressive as the one created by Russian artist Arkadi Kim. He and his team spent around two weeks working on the impressive mosaic, weighing the coffee beans, roasting them to achieve the desired color tones and placing them at just the right spot on the giant panel set up in Gorky Park. Believe it or not, this unique piece of art is made of 1 million coffee beans, weighing an impressive 180 kg (397 pounds). Entitled “The Awakening”, it shows the detailed visage of a girl and alluring coffee aroma making its way to her nose.

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A few years ago, when he started to go bald, English artist Philip Levine decided he didn’t want to shave his head like everyone else. Instead he opted to turn it into a canvas for his art. That’s how the “headism” art movement was born.

While other complain about losing their hair, young Philip Levine looks at the full half of the glass: being bald gives him full freedom in a very specific and original way. Ever since he started shaving his head, in 2006, he began using it as a canvas for his various design ideas, and soon trend websites started posting photos of his bald artworks. In 2009 he realized his head was becoming and inspiration in the art world and decided to put on a show. Ever since then, his name and the headism art he pioneered have become iconic withing London’s art and fashion scenes.

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Only a week ago we featured the stunning portraits Kumi Yamashita creates with a single sewing thread wrapped around nails. That’s when we discovered some of her other impressive masterpieces. Today we present her dirty bed linen artworks  made with dirty army boot prints.

Most of us would like to have clean bed sheets all the time, but even the most obsessed cleanliness freak would let Kumi Yamashita trample all over his bed. The talented Japanese artist turns the cotton bedroom accessory and turns into a canvas for her footprint portraits. I’m not sure if she actually puts the shoes on her feet and creates the artworks with her feet, or just handles them with her hands, but regardless of her technique, the “Someone Else’s Mess” series is one of the most original I’ve ever seen.

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Look at the photo below. I know what you’re thinking, photoshopped, right? Not exactly, although this person doesn’t really need a change of batteries, the photo hasn’t been digitally altered. It’s just the creepy/cool body art of Chooo-San.

Chooo-San discovered her talent for body art during a gap year studying for university admission exams. While taking breaks from her studies, she would often draw eyes on her hands. Soon, her doodles started getting better and better, so she moved on to create even more bizarre body modifications. Using only acrylic paint, the young Japanese girl can turn herself into a creepy mutant with several pairs of eyes covering her face, or a robot with integrated batteries and LCD display.

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New York-based artist Robert Longo creates detailed charcoal drawings that look amazingly photo-like. If you thought your sketches were pretty good, wait till you see what this guy can do.

You know when you look at a photo and you say to yourself “this looks too good to be true”? Most of the time Photoshop is to blame, but Robert Longo decided to create his own black and white photographs, the hard way. Instead of a few mouse clicks, he uses charcoal, graphite and paper, spending hours-on-end to create incredibly realistic works of art. You don’t need to be an expert to figure out Longo is an exceptional artist, but he has captured the attention of the art world, and his works have been exhibited in galleries around the world.

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Canadian artist Jason de Graaf creates hyperrealistic paintings that look more like carefully composed still-life photographs. We’ve featured many artist who can easily fool you into thinking their paintings are photos, but Jason de Graaf really is in a class of his own.

Just so you can understand how incredibly real de Graaf’s paintings look, you should know they’ve inspired the term “Magic Realism” as a description. The talented artist born in Montreal says: “My paintings are about staging an alternate reality, the illusion of verisimilitude on the painted surface, filtered so that it expresses my unique vision. Though my paintings may appear photoreal my goal is not to reproduce or document faithfully what I see one hundred percent, but also to create the illusion of depth and sense of presence not found in photographs.”

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You’ve probably seen intricate paper-cut art before, but Hina Aoyama takes it to a whole new level by achieving an incredible level of detailed using only scissors.

Unlike other artists who use fine tools like an X-acto knife to create elaborate pieces of paper-cut art, Japanese-born Hina Aoyama only uses a pair of scissors and lots of patience. The Paris-based artist takes anywhere from a few hours to several months to complete her lace-like fragile masterpieces, as she needs to keep a steady hand and arm herself with patience throughout the whole creative process. Looking at her works, I can’t help but wonder if Hina has some kind of magical powers that help her cut out such delicate marvels, but the videos she made of her carving tiny paper details prove she’s just a very talented artist.

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Ralph Ueltzhoefer probably took the saying “a picture is worth a thousands words” because he actually builds detailed images from thousands of written words.

The Mannheim-based German artist takes photos of celebrities from the Internet and recreates their portraits with words randomly-selected from Internet biographies, fragments of words and phrases, and Wikipedia articles that have come to define these famous people. Ueltzhoefer sets the white text line by line on the dark background, thus making a statement about how media defines our every day lives in a Web-centered world. His Textportraits are a symbiosis between text and photo, biography and portrait, a readable version of two different components.

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Berlin-based Christian Grillitsch is a bicycle-drawing artist who creates beautiful and engaging artworks by skidding his bicycle wheel across the canvas.

Riding a bicycle is fun and healthy, but Austrian artist Christian Grillitsch has found a way to use this hobby to create some pretty unique works of art. Called “Velodrawings” his creations are skid marks left on white canvases. Sounds easy enough, and although we all like to wear out our tires like this, I doubt most of us can create the same stuff Grillitsch does. All he needs is white canvases, double sided tape to stick it to the floor, a bike, and the talent to skid at the right time without falling flat on his face.

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Communist-era apartment buildings from the former Soviet Union are some of the ugliest edifices in the world, but Ukrainian painter Valery Haroun managed to turn one of them into a marvelous art gallery.

The apartment building in Odessa, Ukraine looks pretty ordinary from afar, but as you draw near the entrance, you realize there’s something special about it. The building’s door has been painted to look like that of a palace, the bland concrete pillars look like old temple columns and there’s a mural of naked Aphrodite looking right at you. Pretty unusual, but we’ve all seen graffiti artworks on apartment buildings, right? But it’s actually the interior of this place that’s truly stunning. Each of its nine floors is covered with colorful artworks, from reproductions of Claude Monet and Victor Vasnetsov, to postcard illustrations and cartoons like Winnie the Pooh and Madagascar.

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Malaysian-born artist Cheeming Boey uses a simple sharpie pen to turn simple Styrofoam cups into unique works of art that sell for hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

Styrofoam cups don’t usually attract a lot of attention, unless they’re mentioned in discussions about environment pollution. They’re cheap and disposable, so  no one really cares about them. Neither did Cheeming Boey, until six years ago, when he discovered they could be used as an original canvas for his sharpie doodles. He was in little coffee shop, in Irvine, California, when he got the urge to draw, but found himself without a piece of paper. So he just grabbed a Styrofoam cup from the trash can and unleashed his artistic talent. The result surprised Boey himself, and the artist immediately realized he was up to something.

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At first glance, Dutch artist Kuin Heuff‘s portraits seem to be made up of a dizzying number of converging lines, but in reality, the creative process couldn’t be more different.

The Rotterdam-based artist, whose work focuses on the intricacies of the human face, starts off by creating acrylic paintings of the faces she wants to render. But while other artists would leave it at that, she takes her art to a whole new level by taking a sharp knife and cutting away maze-like patterns to create negative space. The process becomes even more impressive when you realize how important deciding when and where to cut, considering every stroke of the knife is irreversible. Yet Kuin Heuff pulls it off with relative ease, showing incredible skill and an eye for what’s important in her art.

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Japanese artist Kumi Yamashita creates mind-boggling portraits by wrapping a single UNBROKEN black thread around galvanized nails, on a clear white board.

In the four years since I started Oddity Central, I’ve had the opportunity of discovering many great artists. Most of their works are nothing short of impressive, but there are a few whose artistic genius is simply breathtaking. Kumi Yamashita is definitely one of those few. The Japanese artist living in New York City uses all kinds of common objects to create arresting images, in her quest of exploring art beyond the confines of traditional media. Perhaps her most impressive technique is creating portraits by using a single thread weaved around a series of nails, on a white background. We’ve seen portraits created with thread and nails before, but nothing quite like what Yamashita can do.

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Invented by Lewis Lavoie, Mural Mosaic is an artistic concept which brings together hundreds of artworks painted by various artists into one exceptional image.

Lewis Lavoie created his first mural mosaic in 1997, for a retaining wall next to an art gallery in St. Albert, Alberta, Canada. For this, the artist painted hundreds of individual paintings that were ultimately assembled to make up the face of Michelangelo’s David. It was a monumental achievement that helped Lavoie gain international attention for his unique style. But that was only the beginning of the mural mosaic movement, as seven years later Lewis takes his ingenious concept to the next level, by inviting 70 different artists to create the first community mural mosaic. During a live 24-hour painting marathon, each artist makes his contribution to the “Heritage Fiddler” mosaic.

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Just in case you needed more proof that you don’t actually need designer labels to attract attention, here’s the story of Kara Koskowich, who created her prom dress out of old homework.

After graduation, most students never want to look at homework again, but 17-year-old Kara Koskowich actually decided to look good IN it, by making a unique prom dress out of her old math homework. “For me, it’s not a big, spend your money, you have to look this nice, you have to fit into this mould of grad,” the Canadian girl told CBC, so she decided on a more creative and far less expensive alternative to the classic prom dress. So instead of going window shopping, Kara started thinking about what would make a really interesting dress for prom. And although she had made up her mind since March, and even started working on the dress back then, she only barely managed to finish it in time for the big night. “I did most of it the last week because I’m that kind of person. I procrastinate,” Kara said.

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