Marble Sculptor Makes the Most Uncomfortable Pillows

The fluffy pillows of Norwegian artist Håkon Anton Fagerås look perfect for smashing your face into after a long, hard day, but I wouldn’t recommend it, since they are carved out of white marble.

For thousands of years, blocks of marble have been carved into awe-inspiring artworks by some of the most talented sculptors in human history. It is perhaps the most used material in the history of art, and for good reason. There is a certain elegance, even a delicateness to it, qualities that help artists use it to express the nuances of human emotion, despite its rigid nature. These properties of marble inspired Håkon Anton Fagerås to sculpt the rock into something that would embody its qualities perfectly.

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Woman Spins Cat and Dog Fur into Textile Yarn as a Keepsake for Their Owners

45-year-old Theresa Furrer, a lifelong knitter and crocheter, is helping pet owners keep their beloved animals close to their hearts by knitting their hair into garments and accessories they can wear.

Theresa is part of a community of artists that specialize in a form of yarn spinning known as “chiengora”  – ‘chien’, the French word for dog, and ‘angora’, from the yarn spun from the soft belly fur of the angora rabbit. They basically take dog and cat hair and spin it into yarn that can subsequently be used to make soft clothing or accessories for grieving pet owners. The 45-year-old Pittsburgh woman says that she understands how some people might find her craft somewhat creepy or even gross, but she is not fazed by it at all.

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Russian Man Tries to Sell Childhood Painting for $2.3 Million

A Moscow man made national news headlines this week for putting a drawing he made when he was only six-years-old on sale online for no less than 140 million rubles ($2.3 million).

41-year-old journalist Vladimir Mkrtchyan placed the ad for his old childhood drawing on Russian classifieds site Avito on Monday, and it quickly went viral due to its exorbitant price. 140 million rubles seems kind of steep for a childish drawing, but the seller considers it’s worth twice that much, because it reflects the realities of the Soviet era through the innocent eyes of a six-year-old boy.

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Amazingly Talented Artist “Paints” with Layers of Denim

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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7-Year-Old “Preschool Picasso” Takes Art World by Storm

At just seven years of age, Mikail Akar is already a well-known name in the art world. His paintings sell for thousands of dollars all over the world, and he has already been given the nickname “Preschool Picasso”.

Born in Germany, Mikail’s talent for painting was discovered by mistake, three years ago. His parents bought him a canvas and some handprint paint and let him get creative with them. They has already bought him plenty of toys and action figures, so they thought they’d get him something different, but they definitely weren’t expecting him to paint a masterpiece. But Mikhail did such a good job with his first canvas that his father thought his wife had painted it.

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The Unbelievably Realistic Feline Drawings of Yuki Kudo

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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Sloppy-Looking Toothpaste Paintings on Bathroom Mirror Turn Into Masterpieces When the Lights Go Out

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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The Mind-Boggling Optical Illusions of Stefan Pabst

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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Japanese Artist Creates Detailed Battleship Miniatures Out of Old Newspapers

Japanese visual artist Atsushi Adachi can make just about anything out of newspaper clippings, but his most impressive works yet are a series of miniature battleship replicas perfect to the tiniest of details.

We’ve seen people make impressive miniature models out of cardboard or matchsticks, but Atsushi Adachi finds newspapers to be the perfect medium. He considers them a sort of time machine, as they embody society’s values of that certain period, so by building models of various things using newspapers from that era, he is able to open a window into the past.

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Talented Sculptor Creates Realistic Human Faces Out of Tiny Balls of Clay

A Chinese artist who can turn small lumps of polymer clay into realistic sculptures of celebrities and regular people has been getting a lot of attention on social media for his amazing skills.

The unknown artist behind Pandahappyed, an online service that allows people to order hand-made polymer clay dolls modelled after celebrities, loved ones or even themselves. According to the site’s “about us” section, Pandahappyed turned into a commercial service after the artist’s friends kept asking him to do custom projects that gave him confidence that there might be some real demand for skills such as his.

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The Hyper-Realistic Pencil Portraits of Alena Litvin

Moscow-based artist Alena Litvin has a very special gift – she can recreate a detailed photographic portraits using only colored pencils and mountains of talent. The results are often so impressive that you can barely tell the drawing apart from the photo.

Looking at her amazing drawings, it’s very hard to believe that Alena is a self-taught artist who has only been exercising her craft for the last eight years. From portraits of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson or Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, to regular people who commission her to draw portraits of their loved ones, there’s nothing the young Russian artist can’t pull off. She can take up to 10 days to finish a portrait, which may sound like a long time, but just look at the level of detail in some her artworks…

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The Magical Art of Ink and Water Painting

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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Banana Duct-Taped to White Wall at Art Gallery Sells for $120,000

Art collectors are going bananas over an artwork that essentially consists of a real banana duct-taped to a white wall at an art gallery, with some paying as much as $120,000 for it.

Titled “Comedian”, the original artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was on sale this week from Parisian gallery Perrotin, at the Art Basel festival in Miami. The first edition of the artwork was snatched up by a French art collector for the mind-blowing price of $120,000, and according to gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin a second edition of Comedian was already sold for the same dizzying price. After successfully selling two bananas for a total of $240,000, the artist and the Perrotin gallery owner decided to to up the price of the third edition to $150,000.

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The Hyper-Realistic Pencil Drawings of Kohei Ohmori

Japanese artist Kohei Ohmori rose to prominence over the last few years thanks to his uncanny ability to draw everyday metallic objects to perfection. Just take a look at the three-dimensional Seiko wristwatch below!

Using graphite pencils is usually a dead giveaway that you’re looking at a drawing of something, but in the case of Kohei Ohmori’s artworks, it feels more like looking at high-resolution, black-and-white photographs. The 25-year-old Japanese artist spends hundreds of hours on a single project, using his signature super-sharp pencils, a steady hand and mountains of patience to get the tiniest details just right. As a result, his drawings turn out as realistic as photographs.

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The Mind-Boggling Optical Illusions of Marcello Barenghi

Italian artist Marcello Barenghi has a very special skill – he can draw hyper-realistic versions of everyday objects, using commons drawing tools to make them look three-dimensional.

Even as a child, Marcello Barenghi had a knack for hyper-realistic drawing, trying his hardest to imitate reality. At just 18 months he was drawing airplanes that had tridimensional moving propellers and vertical stabilizers, and as he grew up his skills only improved, winning him several drawing competitions. By the time he graduated high-school and started art school, Barenghi had developed his own hyper-realistic style and technique, but was advised by his art teachers to try his luck outside of Italy, where hyper-realism was more appreciated as an art form.  However, making a career out of drawing realistic versions of everyday things proved harder than he imagined.

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