Melbourne-based artist Thomas Pavitt has set an unofficial record for the world’s most complex dot-to-dot drawing, after completing a 6,239 dots replica of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

One of the most popular themes in Thomas Pavitt’s art is the use of basic techniques to create very complex masterpieces. And since connect-the-dots is one of the most basic artistic techniques, requiring only the ability to count and draw lines, he decided to give it a shot. After searching the web for the standing record for the most complex dot-to-dot drawing without finding anything, the Australian artist and designer decided to set one himself.

Pavitt used 6,239 different-color dots to recreate the famous Mona Lisa, and spent over nine hours connecting them. After each 400 dots he changed the color to keep track of what number he was looking for next, and even used dots for his signature. The artwork took 9 hours and 15 minutes to complete, and while it doesn’t come close to the years it took Da Vinci to paint the original, it’s still an impressive achievement.

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They might look good enough to eat, but Jasmin Schuller’s desserts aren’t at all what they seem. The artist made them using weird ingredients like meat scraps, blood and grease.

Austrian artist and photographer Jasmin Schuller proves you don’t unnecessarily need image processing software like Photoshop to put consumer perception to the test. For her Sweat Meat series of so-called desserts, all it took was outstanding craftsmanship and attention to detail.  She used plenty of meat scraps, two liters of blood, a bucket of animals grease and five kilos of raw meat, and processed them all into mouth-watering treats. For example, that ice-cream sundae is made from various minced meats, covered in “delicious” grease cream, and topped with a cherry carved from a pig’s heart. The cherry syrup is actually blood.

Although only cannibals would find Jasmin’s Sweat Meat truly delicious, the photos she took look so delicious I bet they’d even tempt vegetarians.

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What if an Alien and a Predator decided to put aside their differences and have a baby? It sounds crazy, I know, but I’m guessing that’s what Roongrojna Sangwongprisarn had in mind when he built this mad-looking motorcycle.

Roongrojna is a Bangkok-based artist who creates all kinds of awesome metal sculptures, based on popular monsters, using discarded parts from cars, motorcycles and bicycles. The 54-year-old owns four shops across Thailand, called Ko Art Shop, and exports his works of art all over the world.

You’ve probably seen more impressive Hollywood movie props, but unlike those, this impressive piece of metal work is actually rideable. I have no idea what bike this was initially, or how fast it is, but who needs speed when you’re riding a metal masterpiece like this, right? It’s hard to believe it was made exclusively from discarded metal parts…

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If you’ve always wanted to have yourself cloned, you’re probably going to have to wait a few more years, but in the meantime you can get a creepy doll that looks just like you, from the Clone Factory, in Japan.

Danny Choo, of Culture Japan visited the quirky Clone Factory, in Tokyo’s Akihabara district and decided to try out their services himself. Lucky for us, he also snapped some nice photos of the place and the making process of a miniature clone doll. The so-called cloning process begins with the subject sitting on a chair in a room surrounded by SLR cameras and lighting stands. After he/she has the proper pose, the cameras start triggering in a loop, taking photos from all possible angles. The photos are then transferred into a computer and a 3D model of the client’s head is rendered. Once that’s out of the way, it’s time for the actual doll-making.

This all happens in Japan, so, obviously, they have a high-tech printer that pretty much does all the work. All they have to do is connect it to the computer, insert a tray full of plaster powder and the printer creates the detailed model using layers of ink which harden in the plaster. When the tray comes out, it looks pretty much untouched, but once the excess plaster powder is removed, a creepy, smiling doll is revealed, and it looks so much like an actual person it’s not even funny.

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Designer Miya Ando chose to celebrate her Japanese origins by creating a long-sleeve kimono entirely from stainless steel plates and sterling silver rings.

While it hasn’t been tested yet, considering the materials used to create it, Miya Ando’s furisode style kimono might just be the world’s first bulletproof kimono. Well known for her mastery of steel, the young half-Japanese artist has hand-soldered 4,000 sterling silver rings and stainless steel plates, and used them to create this unusual version of the traditional Japanese garment.

While it could prove a valuable piece of armor, I doubt Miya’s steel furisode kimono is as comfortable as the real thing. Women probably couldn’t even move in that thing, let alone wield a samurai sword, as well. Luckily, it’s just for the sake of art.

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Leicester-born Karen Caldicott is currently living in the New York area, where she stays busy creating plasticine portraits of celebrities.

Well-versed in a multitude of styles, Karen has found  a niche rendering various celebrities in plasticine, and her skill and dedication landed her collaborations with established publications such as the New York Post or Fortune Magazine. She bases her three-dimensional  seven-inch plasticine busts on photographs of the celebrities taken from different angles, and then shapes and carves away the clay until it looks like she intended.

So far, Karen Caldicott has created plasticine illustrations of all sorts of celebrities, from President Barrack Obama, to rock legend Mick Jagger and even Apple CEO, Steve Jobs. But she also does commissions, so if you fancy a clay bust of yourself, contact her via her official blog.

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Using hundreds of small images of classic masterpieces, Russian collagist, portrait painter and historiographer, Maxim Ksuta, has created a series of unique portraits, called Art in Art.

According to English Russia, Maxim Ksuta believes some art forms have ceased to exist in the modern world, which is now getting ready to embrace something new. So he decided to give them new meaning and find a place for them by using tiny images of known artworks (paintings, sculptures, architectural motifs) dating from the antiquity and up to modern times, to create unique collage portraits of his friends.

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Maurice Bennet, also known as “The Toastman“, has created a large scale portrait of Marilyn Monroe using thousands of colorful pieces of toast.

Known for his original toast art, the New Zealand-based artist was commissioned by a Shanghai shopping mall to create one of his signature works. With the help of young local artists, The Toastman created a colorful portrait of Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe, out of 6,000 pieces of toast. The original piece has already been completed and will be placed on display at the Xintiandi Mall, in Shanghai, on Monday, July 25.

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They might look like sloppy prints or stenciled graffiti, but in fact you’re looking at unique works of art made with thousands of poppy seeds. Unbelievable, I know.

These incredible illustrations are the work of British artist Rebecca Foster, renowned for her talent of turning food and spices into regular art mediums. She is regularly commissioned by famous brands in the food industry to create works of art using their products. Apart from this mind-blowing series of poppy seed illustrations, she has used other unusual ingredients, like steak and ketchup, or foods from a traditional Sunday dinner, to make her original works. You can check them out on Rebecca’s official site.

The poppy seed artworks below were created back in 2009 for a Hovis advertising campaign, and each illustration took around five hours to complete.

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You’ll probably never look at maps the same way again, after seeing the works of Ingrid Dabringer. She uses maps as canvases for amazing painted figure drawings.

Ingrid spins old maps searching for figures formed by interdependent lines, and after she spots them she cleverly uses the roads, colors and geography of the map to define her drawings. She basically transforms common maps into drawings of human figures and whimsical creatures, using acrylic paint to reveal their hidden shape. “I like to elevate the mundane. The Mundane is so saturated with meaning if we just take an extra second to dwell on it. The Mundane is saturated with symbolism,” Dabringer says about her art.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen maps recycled into works of art, but Ingrid Dabringer’s works are indeed some of the most creative and inspiring I’ve ever seen. If you like her map-art, you can check out more of it on her Etsy shop and her blog. Now if you’ll excuse I have an old World Atlas I’d like to explore.

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Columbine Phoenix is a talented jeweler with a taste for the macabre. She makes unique jewelry from human bones collected from medical schools and museums.

We’ve covered some pretty bizarre jewelry collections in the past, some were made from insects, others from nail clippings, and even human hair, but Columbine’s “Churchyard” line is the weirdest one yet. She uses various human bones donated for educational purposes and transforms them into unique pieces of jewelry that actually celebrate life rather than death. “Death is a part of life” the designer says in an interview with Vice Style “You can’t die unless you’re alive, and if we weren’t going to die eventually, a whole lot of us would never get around to living.” Strangely enough, that makes sense.

As a child, Columbine Phoenix loved shiny things, and she remembers playing pirates with her brother by stealing her grandmother’s rhinestone button collection from each other. Later she tried making embroidery-floss friendship bracelets and seed beads woven on a loom, but quickly lost interest in things everyone else was doing. She started making jewels from seashells, feathers and other stuff provided by nature, and when a friend from medical school asked her if she wanted to buy some small human bones for her work, she decided to give it a shot. His department was consolidating the bone collection and when he showed them to her for the first time, she knew they were just perfect. Human ivory she called them.

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Artist Kyle Bean has created a series of unique portraits made with pencil shavings, for the new Handmade Issue of Wallpaper Magazine.

We’ve already featured Brighton-based Kyle bean a couple of times, for his intricate matchstick insects and eggshell chicken, and he continues to amaze us with more original works. Having been asked to contribute on the Handmade Issue of Wallpaper, he has created a series of beautiful portraits using only pencil shavings from colored pencils. A time-lapse video of the process of making one of these incredible works of art is also in the works, and will appear in the online edition of Wallpaper Magazine.

With such incredible projects under his belt already, I wonder what Kyle Bean has in store for us, in the future.

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Some artist sculpt stone, others carve wood, but Spanish artist Lorenzo Duran decided to express his artistic talent by cutting tree leaves.

Even if Lorenzo Duran’s artworks were created digitally, like they appear to be, they’d still leave you impressed, but the skilled artist cuts his intricate models into real leaves, using a very sharp scalpel. He believes every natural object and living thing has a bit of art in it and is a good medium to experiment his creativity. Inspired by the old paper-cutting techniques of Chinese and Japanese artists, he decided to try them out on leaves, and although he still has a long way to go, he has created some truly impressive pieces. Whenever he gets an idea for a motif he first puts it on paper, then places it over a leaf and uses the scalpel to cut.

Duran has experimented a lot with cutting various types of leaves, and admits that most of his early works ended up in the trash, but he learned from his mistakes and developed a whole process of preparing leaves and cutting them so they don’t break as often. He has to pick just the right leaves (thicker ones are better), then come the washing, drying, pressing  and cutting. The last part is obviously the most delicate, because fragile leaves can break right at the end, and the artist loses days of work in an instant. Pretty frustrating, but nothing beats the feeling of fulfillment when he actually completes one of his cut-away artworks.

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From the man who brought you the awesome duct tape AT-AT comes one of the coolest R2D2 models ever made.

Len Komanac, better known as DarthLen, onFlickr, loves to build detailed models of Star Wars icons, using cardboard, duct tape and glue. His detailed AT-AT model became an online when photos of it hit the interwebs, last year, and now he’s ready to wow you once more with a giant replica of everyone’s favorite droid, R2D2. Towering at 96 inches/240 cm, this free-standing sculpture is made from cardboard, silver HVAC tape and blue duct tape.

Len was kind enough to send us a list of the materials he used to complete his masterpiece: 4 fridge boxes, 5 AC boxes, 3 dryer boxes, 3 rolls of blue duct tape, 1 roll of aluminum tape, 52 glue sticks, 1 can of white paint and 2 sharpie pens. He worked on it for 50 hours.  This supersized version of R2D2 will be showcased at the “Dr. StrangeLen or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Make the Art” exhibit, in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, so if you’re in the area between July 16 and September 2nd, don’t miss the chance to check it out.

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Chris Jordan is a photographic artist who uses his artworks to bring awareness to a serious problem of our time – consumerism. Seen from afar his images look like modern recreations of famous masterpieces, but as soon as he approaches the viewer is confronted with thousands of photographs of waste assembled into a beautiful picture.

He’s been called “the ‘it’ artist of the green movement” for his ability to send clear messages about mass consumption through beautiful images that end up disgusting the viewer. But while he’s always been interested in photography, he studied law school and became a corporate lawyer who only dedicated his free time to his favorite hobby. His father, a businessman, had also been passionate about photography and Chris remembers he “was filled with regret” that he couldn’t practice it full time. So, determined not to repeat his mistake, the young lawyer moved to Seattle, and quit the bar after ten years of practicing law, to dedicate his life to photography.

It was definitely a risky move, but definitely an inspired one as the success of his early shows in New York and Los Angeles propelled his career. Chris Jordan came to tackle consumerism by chance. He had taken photos of a pile of garbage and found it beautiful because of its complexity and great color, but when friends of his, who were active in consumerism, started commenting on it, he got the idea for his future projects.

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