Albert Zakirov, an artist from the Russian Federation’s Tatarstan Autonomous Republic has an original, albeit controversial painting technique – he uses women’s naked bodies as his paintbrushes.

Albert Zakirov started drawing and painting at an early age and spent much of his childhood preparing for art school. After studying with an excellent teacher for a couple of months in tenth grade, he picked up the necessary knowledge to get admitted into art school, where he quietly studied the basics while experimenting with all sorts of unusual techniques and mediums. He never graduated from art school, but it was there that he first used a woman’s body to paint on canvas, and it was this experience that inspired him to make the technique his own.

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A talented artist working under the pseudonym ‘Hirothropologie’ has become world-famous for his ability to create photo-like portraits using paint, brushes and lots of skill.

It might sound like an exaggeration, but having to distinguish between one of Hirothropologie’s paintings and an actual photo of his model is a very challenging endeavor. Every little detail in his paintings, from loose strands of hair to freckles or creases in his subjects’ clothes, are expertly reproduced on canvas, creating an almost eerie hyperrealistic illusion. It’s hard to believe Hirothropologie is able to achieve this with just paint and a set of fine brushes, but then again, as he puts it, “I put my entire life into this”.

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Dmitry Bragin is a Ukrainian artist who specializes in steampunk masks that make the wearer look more machine than man.

While most of Dmitry Bragin’s stunning-looking masks aren’t technically steampunk, as they contain no moving parts, it’s clear that the sci-fi genre served as the main inspiration for them. The talented artist starts off with a flimsy plastic mask that’s easy to shape as his base and adds all sorts of decorative elements to it in order to transform it into the wearable wonders you see below. The materials in his arsenal range from motorcycle parts and discarded camera lenses to metallic children’s toys, although you couldn’t really tell by looking at the finished product.

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Johannes Wessmark is a self-taught Swedish artist who specializes in hyperrealistic acrylic painting that rivals high-resolution photography.

Johannes Wessmark was born in Karlstad, Sweden in 1962. He had a happy childhood, but he wasn’t the most popular of his peers, preferring instead to observe without interacting. Looking back, the Swedish painter remembers some quirks that hint at the attention to detail his art is now world-famous for. When he was 10, he decided to start cleaning his own room, just to make sure it was done exactly the way he wanted. He sorted all of his toys in straight lines and in color order, which was a bit odd for a kid his age. He also drew and painted a lot, and his mother encouraged him to develop his artistic side, which turned out to be a great idea, as Johannes is one of the world’s most respected hyperrealistic artists.

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Nguyen Phat Tri, a young hairstylist from Vietnam, has been getting a lot of attention for his eye-catching floral hair designs.

28-year-old Nguyen Phat Tri graduated from An Giang University, with a degree in Biotechnology,  in 2015, but as he always had an inclination for the arts, he decided to go to Ho Chi Minh City to study makeup and hairdressing. That may have seemed like a controversial career choice, but time proved that it was the right one, as young Phat Tri quickly made a name for himself on the Vietnamese hairstyling scene, thanks to some truly innovating techniques and designs.

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A Chinese art student recently conducted an intriguing experiment in which she spent three weeks living the good life in Beijing without spending a dime, by pretending to be a well-off socialite.

Zou Yaqi, a 23-year-old art student at the University of Beijing has been getting a lot of attention for her unique graduation project which saw her disguising herself as a socialite in order to enjoy special treatment and help her survive for three weeks without spending any money. For most of May of this year, the young student slept on plush sofas in the lobbies of five-star hotels in the Chinese capital, sipping wine at various events and stuffing her face at free buffets. And she did it all just by pretending to be a rich socialite.

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Armed with an Xacto knife and mountains of patience, Japanese artist Gaku turns all kinds of fruits and vegetables into ephemeral works of art.

Inspired by the Japanese traditional food carving art mukimono, Gaku takes fruits or vegetables from the grocery store and carves them into a variety of intriguing patterns, from geometrical designs to traditional motifs and symbols, and even animal models. But apart from the skill and patience required to create these stunning food carvings, the most impressive thing about Gaku is his speed, as many times the artistic process is a race against time to make sure that oxidation doesn’t ruin his artwork. Weh working on apples or other produce that tends to oxidize quickly, he has to finish his designs in just a few minutes and still have time to photograph them.

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Julie Rhodes is a UK-based artist who specializes in photo-like hyperrealistic paintings of wildlife, particularly big cats like lions and tigers.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking Julie Rhodes’ paintings for photographs, as the differences are very hard to spot for the untrained eye. From her subjects’ intricate fur patterns, to the perfect coloring of the cats’ thick coats and the reflections in their eyes, these paintings are almost perfect. A professional artist with over 20 years of experience, Rhodes specializes mainly in paintings of big cats (lions, tigers, and leopards) but doesn’t shy away from portraying other animals as well, like elephants and zebras.

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The New York Earth Room at 141 Wooster Street is a unique NYC attraction created in 1977 by local artist Walter De Maria by filling an apartment with 140 tons of dirt.

Consisting of 250 cubic yards of fertile dirt covering the floor of an apartment located on the second floor of a building on Wooster Street, The New York Earth Room is one of NYC’s most unusual artsy attractions. The Dia Art Foundation commissioned local artist Walter De Maria to create it in 1977, and it was opened to the general public in 1980. De Maria had previously created two other earth rooms in Germany, but the one in New York is the only one in existence today. Art lovers can visit the unusual attraction, gaze upon the mass of dirt and take in its earthy fragrance, but they are forbidden from stepping on the dirt or even touching it.

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A French graphic designer managed to mix his love of beer with a passion for art by creating beautiful beer bottle cap mosaics of various pop icons.

You could say Paris-based graphic designer Jean Marie Lambert drinks in the name of art. Having noticed that the various beers he loved so much had different colors and designs, he one day decided to combine them into an original mosaic, and the result was so impressive that he decided to turn it into a whole series. Inspired by famous artworks like the Mona Lisa or Girl with a Pearl Earring, and icons like Han Solo or football superstar Maradona, Lambert creates mosaics that a just detailed enough to be familiar and attract viewers’ attention.

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Brazilian tattoo artist Clayton Dias has been getting attention for his signature holographic sticker tattoos that not only have the characteristic metallic shimmer of the real thing but also appear to be applied on the skin.

Sticker tattoos have become really popular lately, and the rising popularity of artists like Lucke Cormier is a clear example of that, but the tattoo style is continually evolving. Case in point, the work of Clayton Dias, a talented tattoo artist from Porto Alegre, Brazil, who has developed his own technique of giving sticker tattoos the holographic treatment, which gives them a characteristic metallic shimmer.

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Dekochari (デコチャリ) is a bicycle decoration movement specific to Japan, and that is characterized by the use of plywood accessories, chrome plating, elaborate light displays and hi-fi audio systems.

Dekochari can be traced back to the 1970s, back when Japan’s Dekotora truck decoration trend started gaining traction. Unable to unleash their creative decorating talent on trucks, kids started adapting the same general style to their bicycles, and they ended up creating their very own culture. Dekochari thrived right alongside dekotora, but as the trucks’ excessive lighting and extra weight started posing legal problems to drivers, both cultures kind of faded from the roads of Japan, and today dekochari bikes are considered rarities.

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Shanghai-based artist Yang Yexin has been getting a lot of criticism for throwing away 1,000 grains of rice made of pure gold as part of a performance artwork to highlight current food waste.

If you’re planning on visiting Shanghai soon, you may want to keep your eyes peeled as you walk through the city streets, as you may stumble on small precious nuggets worth a pretty penny. Local artist Yang Yexin recently released a video of himself throwing 1,000 gold grains in trashcans, in drains, in the grass, and in the Huangpu River, as a way of drawing attention to food waste in modern society. The rice grains  showed in the video were made from 500 grams of gold worth over 200,000 yuan ($31,000), by a jewelry store that made them “in accordance with the actual size of each real rice grain.”

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Some people are so incredibly talented that they can be artistically inspired by the most unexpected of things, such as spilled drinks. Case in point – Italian artist Giulia Bernardelli, whose amazing coffee art began as a mishap.

One day, Giulia was drawing and having her coffee at the same time. At one point, she moved her hand too quickly and spilled her coffee all over the canvas, but the way the coffee stain spread inspired her to pick up the spoon and use it as a brush, to guide the brown liquid. And that’s how her journey into coffee art began. She got better and better at it, and today Bernardelli is regarded as one of the world’s best coffee artists.

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A Danish museum loaned artist Jens Haaning tens of thousands of dollars and asked him to recreate two of his most popular artworks, which involved the use of real banknotes, only he took the money and ran, an act he describes as an original work of art.

The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg asked Jens Haaning to recreate two of his most popular artworks, one he had produced in 2011 called An Average Danish Annual Income, which featured krone banknotes in a frame, and an earlier version, An Average Austrian Annual Income. For the original works, Haaning had borrowed the money from banks, but this time the museum agreed to loan him the cash from its limited reserves. He required 328,000 kroner for the Danish annual salary and €25,000 for the Austrian salary. Only instead of recreating the artworks, he just sent the museum two empty canvases, and the message that him keeping the money they had lent him was the actual artwork.

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