It’s hard to believe, but the bag of potato chips you’re looking at right now isn’t real, it’s just an expertly drawn optical illusion. Twitter user Shinoo (@ Shinoo_0215) has been getting a lot of attention this week thanks to his incredibly detailed color pencil drawings. Actually, calling his artworks “detailed” is a bit of an understatement, considering how life-like they look. Take the bag of potato chips bellow, if you didn’t know it was only a drawing, could you tell it apart from an actual, three-dimensional bag? Heck, I know it’s a drawing and I still can’t believe it. Read More »

Gesine Marwedel is a talented body-painting artist who has the power to transform the naked bodies of her models into mind-bending optical illusions. From swans, to owls, to dolphins, there doesn’t seem to be anything that German artist Gesine Marwedel can’t morph her models into, using body paint. But while most of her works are illusory in nature, obscuring parts of the human body, while transforming others into something new entirely, some are simply abstract works of art, with a deeper meaning. Read More »

Young Serbian artist Sanja Jankovic creates beautiful paintings by using various types of wine – red, white, rosé – instead of oil paint, watercolors or acrylics. Sanja Jankovic has always tried turning things into art mediums, and after giving wine a go, she stuck with it. Not only did the end result look really cool, but the challenge of painting with wine was itself exciting. The talented artist was now limited to tones of red, pink and purple, but that only made things more interesting. The art form, which Jankovic has named “winerelle”, a play on ‘wine’ and ‘aquarelle’, is very unpredictable, as the wine continues to age on the canvas, so the artworks themselves develop over time. Read More »

A very patient Vietnamese artist spent three years meticulously drilling a whopping 45,863 holes smaller than a human hair into a hollowed-out ostrich egg. Nguyen Hung Cuong, a talented artist from Hanoi, Vietnam, has been turning chicken eggs into intricate works of art for over a decade, but his most recent project is by far his most impressive yet. The 30-year-old reportedly spent the last three years of his life carefully drilling tens of thousands of holes, some only 0.2 mm in diameter, to create one of the most impressive egg carving in human history. Read More »

Kay Pike is a talented designer and model from Calgary, Canada, who spends hours on end skillfully covering herself with body paint to transform into popular superheroes and villains. Cosplaying used to be a big part of Kay Pike’s life, but after being diagnosed with congenital arthritis in her hips, which caused her excruciating pain, she just couldn’t sit and sew for hours, like she used to. Luckily, in 2015, during the Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo, she discovered “cospaint”, an intriguing art form that allowed her to transform into virtually any comic, cartoon or video game character by using body paint. Read More »

The Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India, is home to one of the most amazing wooden sculptures ever made – Mephistopheles and Margaretta, a double sculpture featuring two distinct characters on opposite sides. Carved out of a single piece of Sycamore sometime in the 19th century, by an unknown French artist, Mephistopheles and Margaretta is not only the most photographed artwork displayed at Salar Jung Museum, but also one of the most recognizable images on the internet. Photos of this stunning sculptures have been doing the rounds on social media and capturing the imagination of millions around the world, for a very long time. And for good reason, the level of intricacy, and the binary design have remained unmatched in the last two centuries. Read More »

Japanese self-taught artist Rito (@lito_leafart) spends hours painstakingly carving tree leaves to create stunningly detailed scenes that capture viewers’ imagination. Rito’s leaf cutouts are impressive enough by themselves, but the story of what inspired the artist to take up leaf art in the first place makes them even more so. Apparently, the Japanese artist suffers from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and spending hours focusing on a single artwork was his ways of treating his condition. He has been creating at least one of his leaf cutouts a day, as a form of therapy. Read More »

Mexican artist Amadeus Garuda combines his passion for plasticine modeling and his love of all things geek to create some of the most stunning sculptures we’ve ever seen. Amadeus, who goes by Dr. Garuda on social media, is a truly multitalented artist. He starts out by drawing a detailed sketch of his chosen character, in the particular pose he plans on recreating. He then start work on the metal wire frame of the sculpture itself, setting it over the sketch multiple times, to make sure it is correctly bent in the right places. Next, he crumples aluminum foil on the frame, and starts applying strips of red modelling clay. Using only his fingers, a scalpel and a cylindrical rod, he molds the clay into stunningly detailed anatomical parts, creased fabric, armor, and more. Read More »

A stonecutting workshop that set out to carry on the legacy of legendary Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé has managed to raise the art of volumetric mosaic stone cutting to a level never reached before in all of human history. Volumetric mosaic is one of the most complicated and technical hardstone carving techniques. It involves combining volumetric fragments of various colored semiprecious and ornamental stones to assemble impressive sculptural compositions. It has been practiced by Russian craftsmen and artisans for over a century, but Alexei Antonov’s stonecutting workshop in Yekaterinburg has elevated the art form to a whole new level, by incorporating precious metals in the detailed sculptures and using modern technology to make the artworks stunningly detailed. Read More »

Self-taught artist Sergi Cadenas is a master of kinetic wall art, creating not one, not two, but three distinct portraits in a single painting, each revealed when the artwork is viewed from a certain angle. Sergi Cadenas’ amazing artworks consist of rigid vertical strips that he paints individually, by hand. The ‘trick’ is to paint a different person on each side of each strip, so that when viewed from opposite sides, a different person can be seen. But if you stand right in front of the kinetic painting, the features of the two portraits blend to create a third portrait. Read More »

At only 23 years of age, James Cook is already one of the world’s premier typewriter artists, and looking at his works it’s easy to see why. The young architecture student got into typewriter art about five years ago, after reading about Paul Smith, another famous typewriter artist who couldn’t use a pencil or paintbrush to do drawings, because of his severe cerebral palsy. Cook was inspired by the story and intrigued about typewriter art, so he decided to give it a try. It was love at first sight, and after buying his first typewriter from an elderly couple looking to sell up their heap of antiques, James started using it to create illustrations and portraits. Read More »

A talented Japanese food artist uses popular spreads like fruit jams, peanut butter and Nutella to create intricate artworks on slices of white bread. Drawing inspiration mainly from popular anime like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away or Dragon Ball, Japanese artist KU (@ken.tuchy) creates stunningly intricate and edible illustrations with breakfast classics like jam, peanut butter and cocoa spread. He is somehow able to keep all the different fruit jams and the other spreads from mixing, as well as the bread slices from becoming too soggy to work with, and the end result is always nothing short of breathtaking. Read More »

Looking at the beautiful bouquets of Ukrainian artist Olesya Galushcenko, it’s hard to believe that all the flowers aren’t actually real but made of hard porcelain. Olesya Galushcenko is a hydraulics engineer who got into porcelain flower making as a personal challenge. Seven years ago, during maternity leave, she decided to take on an artistic project that involved using her hands, and a decorative flower bouquet caught her eye. The artist was self-taught, so she refused to pay for classes and decided to learn the craft herself using free internet tutorials. But they only served to get her started, because she soon realized that polymer clay wasn’t the right material for the degree of realism she wanted, so she decided to experiment herself and soon discovered that cold porcelain met her requirements. Read More »

It’s safe to say that Toronto-based artist Bashir Sultani isn’t the superstitious type, as he has no problem spilling the salt to create some of the most amazing temporary artworks we’ve ever seen. Afghan-born Sultani originally rose to internet fame about nine years ago, when photos and videos of his early celebrity salt portraits went viral online. They’re still impressive after all these years, but the talented artist has come a long way since, taking his salt art to a whole new level with a life-like food portrait series. Instead of sticking to pure salt on a black canvas, Bashir Sultani now uses colored salt as well to create convincing representation of various foods solely by sprinkling it on a dark plate. Read More »

A trained software engineer, Sachin Sanghe spends most of his free time sculpting sticks of chalk into beautiful artworks, from portraits of celebrities, to depictions of Hindu gods. As a high-school student, Sachin Sanghe was  always called to the front of the class to write notes on the blackboard, so it’s no surprise that he formed a special connection to the humble chalk. He started carving sticks of chalk with his geometry tools as a hobby, and as time went by, he got better at it. But then he got into an engineering college, and his art had to take a backseat to his academic responsibilities. However, after finishing school and getting a job, Sachin was free to return to his special hobby again. He did so, and became so good at it that the self-taught artist is now being hailed as one of the world’s best chalk sculptors. Read More »