The first time people see Xiong Qingzhen’s toothpaste paintings, they’re not very impressed. Frankly, they look sloppy,, but then he flips the light switch in his bathroom and everyone’s jaws hit the floor…

Based in central China’s Hubei province, Xiong Qingzhen got the inspiration for his now famous toothpaste painting technique from his days taking photos with an old film camera. He found the way images on negatives were inverted in a dark room interesting, so one day he decided to apply a similar technique in the comfort of his own bathroom. Using the mirror as a canvas and plain toothpaste as paint, Xiong started painting “negative” portraits of popular celebrities. They didn’t look too impressive to the naked eye at first, but a simple flip of the switch revealed the true artwork.

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When it comes to ultra-realistic, hand-drawn or painted anamorphic illusions, you’d be hard pressed to find someone better than German artist Stefan Pabst. Just take a look at some of his work and you’ll be rubbing your eyes in amazement.

Born in Russia, Stefan Pabst has been living in Germany since he was 15-year-old. In 2007, he started painting and drawing portraits, but quickly got bored with it and began looking for a way to somehow traverse the 2D border of a sheet of paper. As he continued to explore the limits of his talent, Pabst stumbled upon the art of anamorphic illusions, and he hasn’t looked back since. Although he continues to create commission portraits, the German artist has become much more known for his mind-blowing optical illusions.

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When it comes to painting techniques that are satisfying to watch, you’ll be hard pressed to find something better than ink and water painting, the art of dropping a bit of of ink onto water-traced patterns and watching it spread.

French artist David Bayo, whose impressive pointilism portraits we featured last year, has been a lot of attention online for his ink and water painting videos for the past three years. In a 2016 interview, he revealed that he discovered the delicate art form while experiencing with various mediums to find the one that suited him best. After lost of practice, he was able to understand the interaction between ink and water and use the two to create incredible works of art.

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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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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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Danny Schleibe, the creator of a unique art form called “tapigami”, spent a whopping 200 hours making an awe-inspiring portrait of actor Bill Murray exclusively out of hundreds of rolled pieces of vinyl tape glued to a wooden panel.

Sacramento-based artist Danny Schleibe has spent the last 14 years of his life refining the contemporary art of tapigami, which looks very similar to quilling, only with vinyl masking tape instead of rolled pits of paper. He recently perfected his technique to a level that allows him to create portraiture, and his first project was an amazing portraits of Bill Murray made out of tiny strips of rolled tape. It’s only when you get up-close and see how he nailed all the subtle details, like the actor’s beard and eyes, that you really start to appreciate all the work that went into the artwork.

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We’ve featured some impressive body art on Oddity Central, like Luca Luce’s face-painted optical illusions or the colorful chest artworks of Georgina Ryland, but nothing quite like the detailed lip art of Ryan Kelly. The talented makeup artist paints tiny yet intricate portraits of celebrities and popular characters on her lips.

Looking at the kind of detail Ryan Kelly is able to produce on such a tiny and unusual canvas, it’s hard to believe that her lip art started out as a joke. Four years ago, Ryan and her husband were on the couch watching Katy Perry’s Superbowl halftime show, when their attention was caught by one of her dancers, who later went viral as “Left Shark”. He was fumbling through the choreography, but looked cool doing it, and they both found him hilarious. It was the makeup artist’s husband who suggested that she paint a shark on her lips and the fins on her fingers so she could puppet her very own Left Shark performance. She did just that and posted a photo of her facial makeover on social media. The response was overwhelmingly positive and inspired her to delve deeper into lip art.

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Today, Dan Drake, aka ‘Dancakes’, is known as one of the world’s most talented pancake artists, but few people know that he never planned, nor trained for this career. He was just a guy flipping fried foods at a diner to make ends meet, but his artistic talent catapulted him to international fame.

Dan had always had a talent for drawing, but never really considered turning it into a career. In high-school, he would doodle and draw comics in the back of the classroom out of boredom, and dreamed of becoming a renowned musician with his band, Psychedelic Psycho Nuts. While trying to get his musical career off the ground, Drake got a job as a fry cook at the Courtesy Diner, in his home city of St. Louis. Because he needed to earn his chops, he was placed on the slow shifts, which resulted in few tips but a lot of time on his hands. It was on one of these shifts that he got his feet wet in the world of pancake art.

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If you happen to own a mountain or cliff that you’ve been struggling to sell, maybe you can strike a deal with this multimillionaire who wants to carve his family’s faces into it, Mount Rushmore style.

Online luxury marketplace HushHush.com recently revealed that a mysterious multimillionaire reached out to them with a very unusual request – he is looking to buy a mountain or a cliff  in the UK so he can turn it into a personal Mount Rushmore. The stone real-estate has to be large enough to fit the buyer’s carved portrait, as well as those of his wife, their three children and the family dog. The man is apparently willing to pay up to £12 million ($15.5 million) for the mountain itself, and has a separate budget for a team of stone carvers to create the family portraits.

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A talented food artist from Japan has getting a lot of attention on Instagram for her ability to turn plates into delicious works of art by painting them with melted chocolate.

Most parents often tell their children not to play with their food, but if the melted chocolate of Japanese artist Norico are any indication, playing with your food can lead to some spectacular results. Using only her fingers and some basic kitchen utensils, Norico can painting anything from portraits of Japanese celebrities and popular cartoon characters, to abstract geometric motifs and wedding reception messages. The ephemeral nature of her art allows Norico to experiment at her heart;s desire, and in her Instagram and YouTube videos she often cleans her unusual canvas several times after creating some exceptional painting and start all over again.

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At just 31 years of age, Elena Gnut, Pastry Chef from Kaliningrad, Russia, is already recognized as one of the world’s most talented cake artists. And looking at her impressive portfolio, it’s easy to see why.

Elena Gnut’s cakes look more like artistic sculptures than treats meant to be eaten. Browsing through her popular Instagram, you often feel like you’ve found the most amazing cake you’ve ever seen, but then you scroll further down and find even more impressive ones. Whether she’s molding the frosting into whimsical shapes or using edible dyes to paint incredible scenes or portraits, the young confectioner is always coming up with new and intriguing ideas that keep her Instagram fans coming back for more.

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Police in Turkmenistan have begun inspecting public and private toilets across the country for evidence of photos of president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov being used as toilet paper.

It sounds like news you would only expect to read on a satire news website like The Onion, but this is Turkmenistan president we’re talking about here, the same country that earlier this year banned black cars because its president loves white, so this is sadly painfully true. After news started going around that people were using bits of newspaper with the president’s face on them as toilet paper, police and landfill workers were ordered to look for evidence of this unusual offence and issue warnings that such behavior could have serious consequences.

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When people ask Japanese artist Maruraba_2 (his Twitter handle) what drawing and design software he recommends, his answer is always ‘Excel’. Many take it as a joke, but only because they have no idea that his incredibly detailed anime art is created exclusively with the spreadsheet program.

To those of us who don’t work in accounting or simply hate crunching numbers, Microsoft Excel is extremely boring, but only because we haven’t discovered its true potential. To Twitter user @Maruraba_2, on the other hand, the spreadsheet software is an extremely valuable artistic tool that allows him to create amazing anime-inspired artworks. I have no idea how he does it, but all the digital drawings he posts on Twitter are done exclusively with Microsoft Excel.

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Two years ago, Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin didn’t even know how to bake, but today she is widely regarded as the world’s most talented pie maker. And, believe it or not, she’s entirely self taught.

Jessica Leigh Clark-Bojin’s amazing journey into the world of elaborate pies began a couple of years ago, as a New Year’s resolution to cut down on sugar. Pies just seemed like the safest way to satisfy her dessert cravings, but there was just one problem – she didn’t know anything about baking, or cooking in general for that matter. So she dedicated six months to developing her baking skills, and it paid off big-time. These days, Clark-Bojin’s fabulous pies are all the rage on social media and she’s able to make a living by selling how-to guides to like-minded pie enthusiasts who want to bake their own edible works of art.

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Most of us see used teabags as stained, soggy pieces of trash, but to visual artist and graphic designer Ruby Silvious they are miniature canvases just waiting to be turned into artworks.

Three years ago, Ruby Silvious came up with an ingenious way of combining two of her favorite pastimes – painting and drinking tea – by using the used teabags as small pieces of canvas. She started a project called 363 Days of Tea, creating a unique teabag painting every day for 363 days. To the New-York-based artist, it served as a sort of daily diary, allowing her to record her feelings and thoughts as whimsical miniature illustrations, but also compelled viewers to re-evaluate their views on found and recycled materials.

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