Artist Makes Celebrity Portraits from Thousands of Circles

Using an original technique he calls Digital Circlism, artist Ben Heine creates detailed portraits of celebrities like Eminem, Bob Marley or Elvis Presley.

A Belgian artist born in the Ivory Coast, Heine is most famous for his Pencil vs Camera series, which was covered by many of the major online media outlets, but his Digital Circlism portraits are equally, if not more impressive. Using a sharp round brush in Photoshop CS4, he applies thousands of circles on a black background, until he creates a colorful, realistic portrait. You might think he uses some kind of automated process to apply every circle, but that’s actually the most remarkable thing about Ben Heine – he adds every one of the circles individually. Each circle has a different color, a different tone and a different size, which makes creating a single one of these artworks very time consuming. His latest work, a portrait of hip-hop icon Eminem, is made exclusively with flat circles on a black background, and took nine days of intensive labour to complete.

A new technique, developed by Ben Heine himself, Digital Circlism could certainly develop into an important artistic movement.

 

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Toothpick Artist Creates Detailed Toothpick Portraits of Celebrities

Steven J. Backman, one of the world’s most talented toothpick artists, creates detailed portraits of celebrities and icons exclusively out of toothpicks.

The first time I visited Mr. Backman’s official site I was fascinated by his incredible models of famous landmarks made from a single toothpick, which I presented here on Oddity Central, a while back. But I remembered seeing a series of incredibly detailed portraits that the artist creates exclusively out of wooden toothpicks, and just had to show them to you guys.

Using dozens of toothpicks and glue, Steven J. Backman manages to create unique masterpieces that look like the work of a talented graphic designer. He obviously spends a lot of time working on them, because the likeness and attention to detail are simply amazing.

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The Crocheted Portraits of Jo Hamilton

Portland-based artist Jo Hamilton has a house full of balls of yarn,which she uses to create amazing crocheted portraits and landscapes.

Jo remembers she was only six when her grandmother taught her to to crochet, but it wasn’t until ten years later that she really dedicated herself to the old craft and started crocheting in a crafty way. She attended the Glasgow School of Art, where she experimented with both painting and drawing, but she felt that she needed an original medium to help her express her talent.

She was inspired to use crocheting as an art form after seeing an exhibition at the Portland Craft Museum that inspired artists to use techniques that are originally considered to be art. Happy that she had finally found a means of expression that she was comfortable with, Jo immediately started crocheting a cityscape made of six blocks, named “I Crochet Portland”. She now spends anywhere from forty five hours on a portrait, up to three years on one of her cityscapes, but the most important thing  is she never gets bored of crocheting.

The portraits Jo creates are incredibly detailed, and many people have speculated about the techniques and stitches she uses, but the artist claims her pieces come alive from the inside – it’s an organic process that implies no graphs, plans or charts. Of course, this means she doesn’t know the exact outcome of her effort, but Ms. Hamilton says she has learned to trust her way of working.

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The Eco-Friendly Junk Mail Portraits of Sandhi Schimmel Gold

Using a technique she calls Acrylic Mosaic Fusion, artist Sandhi Schimmel Gold takes junk mail and other paper waste and turns it into beautiful portraits.

Phoenix-based Sandhi Schimmel Gold has been fascinated by art for as long as she can remember. In her youth, she spent most of her days sitting quietly in the bedroom, drawing, and she remembers cutting school to spend her days in museums and art galleries around New York City. Although she studied art in school, Sandhi says she is pretty much self taught, and most of her works are influenced by her extensive travels.

The artist first felt inspired to create mosaic portraits years ago, when she was in Venice, Italy. She saw a portrait made of small colorful glass fragments ans since it was to heavy to transport home, by train, Sandhi decided to create one just like it. After a period of trial and error using glass and tile, she decided to change her art medium to ephemera.

Now, using upcycle junk mail, post cards, photos, calendars and other paper junk together with water-based, non-toxic paint, Sandhi Schimmel Gold creates the most amazing mosaic portraits. She doesn’t use any kind of technology or dies in her art; everything is hand-cut, hand-applied, hand-embellished and hand-finished. “My vision is to create beautiful yet thought-provoking images of beauty” says Sandhi, and she manages to do it by using paper waste most people throw away.

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The Bottle Cap Portraits of Molly B. Right

Molly B. Right is a brilliant self-taught artist, from Charleston, South Carolina, who uses discarded bottle caps to create incredible portraits.

She began creating bottle cap portraits back in 1993, when she started pondering the phrase “Jesus Saves”. Saves what? – Molly asked – Does he just save souls, or if he had the time, would he also save things like string or rubber bands? Does he save bottle caps? And that’s when she took this question and turned it into a full size portrait of Jesus. “Now I’m doing bottle cap portraits of archetypal women that don’t have anything to do with Jesus saving anything. Now I’m the one who is saving bottle caps.” Molly says in the artist statement on her official site.

The process of creating bottle cap portraits begins with a painted portrait on a sheet of metal. Molly then glues the vintage bottle caps in an overlapping pattern, sort of like scales on a snake. She pays great attention to details, making sure there are no visible glue traces, and using several transparent washes of glaze to define her portraits even further.

The bottle caps Molly B. Right uses for her beautiful portraits are considered collectibles on their own, since all of them date from the 30’s to the 70’s.

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The Broken Vinyl Portraits of Mr. Brainwash

French street-artist Thierry Guetta, also known as Mr. Brainwash, has created a series of portraits of international pop icons, out of broken vinyls and CDs.

Mr. Brainwash, rumored to be friends with legendary street artist Banksy, has probably smashed thousands of old vinyls into pieces, to create the artworks for his latest collection, entitled “Icons”. Though they all look like they’ve been drawn with a stencil, each of them is made exclusively out of broken pieces of vinyl and CDs. The intricate facial expressions were achieved by using quarter inch vinyl cuts, while chiseled CDs were used to reproduce the shine of sunglasses.

“I had to find something that nobody in the world of art had done. I wanted to take singers that spent their whole lives singing for us and make them live forever with what they sold.” Mr. Brainwash said about his incredible vinyl portraits.

His unique portrait of Jim Morrison reportedly sold for $100,000, and others had a price tag of three times that much.

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Mind-Blowing Embroidered Portraits by Daniel Kornrumpf

We’ve featured some truly magnificent pieces of embroidery on Oddity Central, but Daniel Kornrumpf’s intricate portrait are simply breathtaking.

A true master with the needle, Philadelphia-based artist Daniel Kornrumpf creates extraordinary embroidered portraits that look a lot like real paintings. Even more surprising is the size of these amazing artworks. While they may look like giant paintings, in the close-up photos, in reality they are smallish creations, set against a large white background.

Just like the brown tape paintings of Mark Khaisman or the collage paintings of Megan Coyle, Daniel Kornrumpf’s embroidered artworks are incredibly realistic.

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The Chewing Gum Portraits of Jason Kronenwald

Jason Kronenwald is an extraordinary artist who creates incredible celebrity portraits out of chewed pieces of bubblegum.

Gum Blondes” is a series of portraits of famous blondes, from Britney Spears to Madonna and even Hillary Clinton. Although I’m pretty sure he isn’t the first artist to do portraits of these stars, he is the first one to do it using only chewing gum. Jason Kronenwald executed his first chewing gum artwork in 1996, and over the years improved his technique to the point where you couldn’t guess the only medium is colored bubblegum. He recently opened a new exhibition of portraits, entitled “A Fresh Pack of Gum Blondes.”

While I’ll admit it’s hard to believe, Jason adds no dye to his chewing gum portraits. Colors and tones are obtained by simply chewing a variety of colored gum, regardless of their brand. He even has a team of chewers, so he doesn’t put any gum in his mouth, unless he absolutely has to. Each portrait is created on a plywood surface, which is then sealed with an epoxy resin that protects and preserves it for long periods of time.

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Zhang Dexuan – The World’s Only Hair-Woven Portraits Artist

While  Zhang Dexuan’s hair-woven portraits may by just slightly bigger than a fingernail, but their incredible detail require weeks, sometimes months of work.

66-year-old Zhang Dexuan, from China’s Sichuan province, claims he is the only artist in the world able to create detailed portraits from strands of human hair. Using just five simple tools and a magnifying glass, Zhang manages to created incredible portraits, from hundreds of hair strands collected from members of his family. Judging by the tools used, you might think the art of weaving hair is pretty simple, Zhang Dexuan claims he is the only hair weaving artist on Earth, and has practiced it for the last 54 years.

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Zac Freeman’s Incredible Junk Portraits

Looked at from up close, Zac Freeman’s artworks look like common piles of junk, but take a few steps back and you’ll discover amazingly detailed portraits.

You know that stuff most of us throw away after a while, things like old buttons, LEGO bricks, keyboard keys? That’s exactly the kind of material Zac Freeman uses to create his unbelievable portraits. He began gathering junk and found objects in 1992, and started gluing them to pieces of wood, creating various portraits.

In the words of the artist:

“I was interested in communicating through visual representation in apparent 2-dimensional space and through the actual objects used for the medium in 3-dimensional space. It is very important to me that I incorporate the actual objects into the art as opposed to a picture or rendition of it because it better expresses the intention of the artwork. I feel the junk is more powerful being present. It is an actual thing to be reckoned with that existed in this time and place and carries energy in and of itself.”

I was thinking about how many artists use junk as an art medium these days, and then it hit me: it might seem like a peculiar thing to use in art, but junk is everywhere around us, and so easy to come by, so it’s no wonder artists use it in their artworks.

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The Junk Portraits of Vik Muniz

Using domestic and industrial junk, Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is able to recreate anything, from photographs to famous paintings.

Just because the artworks of Vik Muniz is made of junk, doesn’t mean it stinks. he’s actually been living in New York for the last 27 years, and is now recognized as one of the most original artists in the Big Apple. Over the years he has worked with various mediums, from chocolate syrup to caviar and even diamonds, but it seems garbage has become his favorite.

The “Junk Portraits” series of Vik Muniz features reproductions of classic paintings like Saturn devouring one of his children, by Goya, Mars, God of War, by Velasquez, or Sisyphus, by Titian. They have all been recreated from various junk items, on a giant warehouse floor and photographed from an elevated position, to make individual objects hard to distinguish.

Although the actual recreation of his junk portraits from garbage, might seem like the most important part of his job, his work isn’t completed until he takes photos of them.

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The Zombie Portraits of Grayson Castro

Grayson Castro is an original artist with an affinity for zombies. I’ve never even imagined what Jesus or Barrack Obama would look like as zombies, but thanks to Grayson’s art we don’t have to. You can also check out Audrey Hepburn or Dolly Parton as mindless zombies, and even John McCain. I always knew politicians were monsters, but munching on a baby’s limbs seems a little too much.

You can see more of Grayson Castro’s artworks on his website and Flickr stream. Read More »

Artist Creates Star Portraits Using Prescription Pills

In an attempt to highlight celebrities’ problems with drugs, talented American artist Jason Mecier has created a series of portraits made of differently colored prescription pills.

Artists like Courtney Love and Kelly Osbourne fought with their drug addictions for a long time, while Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger lost their lives because of them. By creating their portraits out of pills, Mecier tries to emphasize the dangers of drug abuse.

Jason Mecier’s pill-portraits will be a part of his Celebrity Junk Drawer show, held at the Ghettogloss Gallery, in Los Angeles, on March 17.

Photos via Entertainmentwise

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Three-Dimensional Debossed Tattoos Look Carved into Flesh

English tattoo artist Daniel Gulliver has become known for his signature debossed tattoos, which look like they have been carved into the wearer’s skin.

Daniel Gulliver, also known as Gully, hails from London in the UK. He specializes in a variety of tattoo styles, from miniature ultra-realistic portraits to impressive optical illusions, like floating objects and characters with shadows placed perfectly to emphasize the floating illusion. However, Gulliver is best known for his debossed tattoos, which appear carved into the skin. They can be unnerving to look at, but there is no denying the talent and painstaking work that went into making them.

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Woman Sets Guinness Record with 18 Tattoos of Madonna

A Kansas woman set a new Guinness World Record for ‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body’ with 18 portraits of legendary singer Madonna.

Tara Berry has been a fan of Madonna since 1983 when the pop icon put out her hit single ‘Borderline’, but she only started getting tattoos of her in 2016, at a time when the artist was actively looking for fans who had her tattooed on her bodies to appear in one of her videos. Tara had been wanting to do it for a while, and this gave her an extra incentive to finally go under the tattoo gun, but little did she know that it was just the beginning of her tattooing journey. She ended up getting a whopping 18 tattoos of Madonna on her body, enough to claim the Guinness record for ‘most tattoos of the same musician on the body’.

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