The pencil drawings of Enrique ‘Kike’ Bernal would look good enough with that mysterious, colorful glow, but there is no denying that the added effect makes them that much more intriguing.

The young Mexican artist usually relies on mechanical pencils and pens to create his cartoonish drawings, but he recently incorporated a new, digital tool into his arsenal – Medibang Paint, an app that allows him to add artificial lighting to his drawings. He still has to make clever use of the colorful, almost fluorescent glow to nail the effect perfectly, so it’s not like anyone ca use it to create the same style of artworks. The mysterious glow only adds an extra layer of creativity to Bernal’s already excellent sketches and add a modern twist the to centuries-old art of portrait sketching.

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Warped or cracked furniture isn’t ideal, unless it’s that way by design, which is exactly what makes the whimsical cabinets of Henk Verhoeff so special.

The retired carpenter from Auckland, in New Zealand, went viral the other day, after his daughter started posting pictures of his amazing wooden cabinets on Facebook. At first glance, they look digitally altered to create the illusion of cracks or warps, but in reality they are designed and executed that way by hand. And what makes his creation even more special is that they continue to remain functional, despite their apparent defects; the drawers all open and close, and despite the reduced space, thousands have declared their willingness to pay just to have one of Henk Verhoeff’s wooden wonders in their homes.

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Colombian artist Diana Beltran Herrera creates incredibly realistic bird sculptures by carefully attaching bits of colored paper.

To say Diana Beltran Herrera’s hands are super-precise instruments would be an understatement. The talented artist uses her innate dexterity and years of practice to create amazingly-detailed models of various birds, from the common sparrow to tropical parrots, out of bits of glued paper. To represent the birds as they are in nature, Herrera makes her sculptures life-size. Over the last decade, she has created paper sculptures of hundreds of bird species.

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It’s hard saying goodbye to your favorite pair of jeans, even when they’re way beyond wearable, but English artist Ian Berry has found a way to avoid throwing away denim, by using it to create beautiful works of art.

Netherton-born artist Ian Berry, aka Denimu, has made quite a name for himself after his unique art took the art world by storm. It’s hard to believe the idea of using old denim as medium for his art came after a call from his mother, Christine, asking him to clean out his room.: “It was about six or seven years ago my mum was clearing out my old room and she wanted me to go through my things. I found loads of old jeans and denims and I noticed the different colors and shades. I kept hold of them but it was only about 18 months later I began to do something with them.” Little did he know his experiment would soon make him and his denim art famous all over the world.

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When it comes to hyper-realistic drawing, cats and other felines must be among the most difficult things to pull odd due to their fur. Getting every strand just right requires a steady hand and mountains of patience, and that’s what makes Yuki Kudo’s artworks so damn special.

Over the past decade, we’ve posted some pretty impressive hyper-realistic artworks on this website, so it takes some thing special to catch our attention. However, the first time I laid eyes on the color pencil drawings of Japanese artist Yuki Kudo, they took my breath away. I still find myself staring at some of his masterpieces, looking for clues that it’s just a drawing and not some digitally enhanced photo or CGI graphic. Oh, and did I mention he is only 18 years old?

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Norwegian cake artist Caroline Eriksson recently went viral for an awe-inspiring sculpture of Groot made exclusively out of gingerbread, but few people know that this is only the latest of her now traditional Christmas gingerbread masterpieces.

Everything started just before Christmas of 2013, when Caroline Eriksson showed off her edible Optimus Prime, a complex, edible sculpture made up of between 700 and 800 individual pieces of gingerbread. Photos of her very first gingerbread wonder got a lot attention on social media, particularly on Reddit, and even won Eriksson the grand prize of 40,000 NOK ($6,500) in a gingerbread contest. Since then, she has been dedicating all her free time in the two months leading up to Christmas every year to designing, baking and putting together the most amazing gingerbread sculptures.

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Hong Kong-based artist Alfred Chen takes a single thread of yarn over 5,000 meters long and weaves it around a frame made up of around 300 metal nails to create stunningly realistic celebrity portraits.

Chen starts the creative process by selecting a digital image he wants to recreate. He then changes the color version to grayscale, adjusting the brightness and contrast to better expose the shadows and highlights he will have to recreate with thread. Finally, he relies on an algorithm that tells him exactly how to weave a single thread around the 300 metal nails in order to recreate the picture in real life. Then the real work begins.

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When it comes to recreating the characters of Japanese horror manga artist Junji Ito in real life, there’s no one better for the job than dedicated fan Mamakiteru.

Mamakiteru’s Twitter bio reads “I want to live in the world of Junji Ito”, and since living in the artist’s manga is impossible, she decided to do the next best thing – bring Ito’s characters into the real world, using face paint and a bit of digital editing. Most of her work involves expertly applying makeup to turn herself into almost perfect renditions of Junji Ito manga characters, with digital editing only being used to recreate surreal images which could not otherwise exist in our world. She’s been at it for four years now, and has amassed quite a following on social media.

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In an effort to promote sustainable agriculture, Irish as agency Rothco teamed up with German artist Diana Scherer to create The Book That Grew – a 22-page tome created by manipulating the roots of living plants to grow in the shape of letters and diagrams.

We wrote about plant root manipulation for artistic purposes in the past, but this is probably the most ambitious and impressive such project we’ve ever come across. All elements of The Book That Grew, including the ink and binding, were made from grass to show farmer just how powerful a resource it can be, when managed properly. That’s actually the main point of the book, which contains 10 simple yet valuable lessons designed to help maximize sustainability of one of the most valuable agricultural resources, grass. And what better to convey the message to farmers than in the form of an all-organic book grown from that very grass.

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A homeless artist in the Indian state of Kerala spends most of his days decorating concrete walls and buildings with beautiful murals he paints using only plant leaves, mud, charcoal and natural pigments.

Everyone knows him as Raju, but that’s not his real name. Judging by his dirty clothes and unkempt beard, you’d think he was just one of the many street dwellers in Kollam City, Kerala, but he’s actually an insanely talented artist. For at least 8 years now, Raju has been entertaining the people of Kollam by painting beautiful murals on whatever clean concrete walls he can find, using plant leaves as paint brushes, and plant saps, mud, charcoal and natural pigments as paint.

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If you thought the average balloon dog or rabbit you commonly see entertainers twist at children’s parties was impressive, get ready to have your mind blown. Japanese artist Masayoshi Matsumoto takes the art of balloon animals to a whole new level, creating insanely detailed sculptures that often look too good to be true.

The average balloon animal takes a skilled artist a few seconds to a couple of minutes to create, but Masayoshi Matsumoto spends between two and six hours on a single creation. It’s not that he’s not talented enough, quite the contrary, his works simply display a whole other degree of detail. From realistic-looking octopuses and iguanas, to large models of flies, centipedes and caterpillars, there’s literally no animal that Matsumoto can’t create using simple balloons if he really puts his mind to it.

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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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Looking at the artworks bellow, you could swear they the charcoal drawings of a talented artist, but they’re actually not drawings at all, but hair paintings, and they’re hand-made not by an artist, but a skilled hairdresser.

Allen Chen, who works as a hairdresser at the XB Hair Professional salon in Changhua, China, recently became an internet sensation in his home country, after photos and videos of his incredibly detailed hair paintings went viral online. His latest masterpiece, a “hairy” portrayal of Romance of the Three Kingdoms heroes Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fey has been massively shared on Weibo, and videos of the young hairdresser carefully arranging the hair trimming to create the three characters have already been viewed millions of times. And looking at the quality of these artworks, it’s easy to see why everyone is so impressed by Allen’s talent.

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The intricate aluminum can sculptures of Noah Deledda look like the work of precise automated machines, but the Tampa Bay-based artist makes them all by hand, using only his thumbs to create dents and creases in the soft metal.

Looking at the perfect geometric patterns sculpted into these shiny aluminum cans, you’d be excused for thinking that Noah Deledda is actually a robot. Just look at them, there’s no way anyone could be this precise with their hands, let alone only their thumbs. Which is why the talented artist has had to produce video evidence of the creative process, and prove that he doesn’t just use some kind of press to shape the recycled aluminum cans.

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A Japanese high-school student recently got his five minutes of fame on Twitter after posting photos of an incredibly detailed action figure he made out of around 300 discarded cicada shells.

Twitter-user @ride_hero came up with the idea of using discarded cicada shells for artistic purposes after accidentally stepping on one at school. Looking at the shattered shell, he thought to himself “what a waste” and challenged himself to come up with a way of reusing all the discarded cicada shells at his high-school. Evening Cicadas, or Higurashi, are very common in Japan during the summertime, and they tend to shed their shells almost everywhere, so it wasn’t hard for @ride_hero to collect hundreds of them in his high-school yard alone. After finishing his AO exams, the high-school senior needed to kill some time over the summer vacation, so he started experimenting with the collected cicada shells.

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