We’ve all heard of and probably even known people who snore, smile, talk and even walk in their sleep. But creating art while sleeping? Now, that’s something! This is exactly the curious case of Lee Hadwin, a 37 year old artist from London, who has been drawing in his sleep since the age of four. When he first started out, he would walk around in his sleep, scribbling on the walls of his house. He once carved on an old bureau, a family heirloom. His mother wasn’t too pleased with this. But soon, Hadwin’s scribblings turned into serious forms of art. As his artwork began to get more beautiful and intricate, he started to gain attention. His “sleep-art” has become so popular now that each piece fetches him a handsome six-figure price. He has produced around 200 pieces of art so far. He now goes to bed every night prepared, with his sketch books and art materials scattered around his flat.

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In 1989 Chinese artist Zhang Baohua invented a new style of painting which requires the artist to use his finger and palm prints to create unique works of art. It’s hard to believe such masterpieces can be created without any tools, but Zhang Baohuang manages to do it by using just his fingers and palm prints. His unique painting style is characterized by a concise, lively style and a sense of reality, and is considered a combination of traditional Chinese painting and the structural features of Western painting. Most of his works depict animals, especially dogs. Zhang’s works have been featured in art galleries all around the world, and he is known as “China’s world famous palm painting artist”. Read More »

Using photos for loose reference, Brooklin-based artist Alyssa Monks creates incredibly realistic paintings that make viewers scratch their eyes in awe. Although many set  photo realism as their ultimate goal, artists that can  make people ask themselves “Is this a photo I’m looking at?” when they look at their masterpieces, are really rare. Alyssa Monks is one of those few talented masters that can recreate a photo from scratch using a paintbrush, as well as add their own personal touch and making an artwork really their own. Looking at her amazing works, it’s hard to believe they’re actually painted, and viewers are often only convinced when thy get close enough to see the brush strokes. The paintings are so realistic you can make out every little detail, down to the tiny imperfections of a subject’s skin. Read More »

Oleg Shuplyak is a talented Ukrainian oil painter who uses hidden images to turn his artworks into mind-blowing optical illusions. Born on September 23, 1967, in the Ternopol region of the Ukraine, Oleg Shuplyak studied architecture at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute, but his passion was always painting. Although he creates all kinds of beautiful paintings, it was his talent of transforming his works of art into optical illusions that really caught my eye. Objects and characters in his paintings are aligned perfectly in such a way they create outstanding illusions that are easily spotted. I find his art fascinating, and having seen some pretty awesome optical illusions in the past, I have to say his works are some of the best I’ve ever come across. Read More »

You can’t rush art! That’s what they say anyway, but that rule doesn’t apply to the members of Ukraine’s national school of underwater painting, who have just 40 minutes of oxygen to complete their masterpieces. Painting usually takes patience and comfort to produce memorable works of art, but the artists painting in the depths of the Black Sea can’t really afford to take their time, because that would mean risking their lives. The unusual group of painters, all certified divers, work at depths of between 2 and 20 meters, and claim what they do is just like regular painting, only their canvases are covered with a waterproof adhesive coating, before they plunge into the sea. Although they decide at what depth they want to work, underwater painters have to be very careful because the deeper they go the more color is lost, and on the surface colors look totally different. Red, for example, turns brown or even black.

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Radya Timofey, a 23-year-old Russian artist is taking the art world by storm with a series of original paintings made by throwing Molotov cocktails at his canvases. They are often used to cause chaos, but young Radya Timofey is turning Molotov cocktails into art tools to create beautiful portraits of soldiers who fought in World War II. He uses a mix of home-made napalm and oil-based substances to sketch the outlines of the portraits and then throws a Molotov cocktail at the canvas, setting it ablaze. After the artwork has stopped burning, a charred figure is revealed. Although the actual “painting” takes place in abandoned outdoor areas, Radya Timofey says “of course it’s dangerous to use fire like this, but we are careful. We put them on the hospital as a testament to their bravery, in life they literally did have to put their faces in the fire to fight the Nazis.” Read More »

Toronto-based artist Amy Shackleton creates amazingly detailed paintings without using brushes, or even her fingers. Instead she just relies on gravity to slowly guide the paint across the canvas. It’s almost impossible to believe anyone can paint such beautiful artworks without a paintbrush, but actually doing it all by using the laws of gravity? That can’t be true, right? Actually it can, and if you’re not going to take my word for it, just check out the timelapse video at the bottom of the page, that features around 30 hours of work compressed into just two minutes. I watched it several times, and I still can’t get over how talented this girl is.

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Japanese artist Seikou Yamaoka uses a $2.99 application called ArtStudio, and his fingertips to create incredible-looking portraits on his iPod Touch and iPad. And he does it all during a long train commute. It’s amazing what some people can do with their hands, but Seikou Yamaoka’s work is even more impressive considering he only uses his fingertips. By tapping and sliding his fingertip over the 3.5-inch screen of an iPod Touch, he creates beautiful portraits that look a lot like they’ve been painted with watercolor. That’s actually the talented artist’s goal – to produce  images that look more like watercolour paintings than digital artworks. He uses ArtStudio, a cheap application available on the Apple App Store to create complex colorful images over several hours, during a train commute to work. He starts with a blank canvas, draws an outline of the face he’s about to reproduce and carefully adds strokes of color until it looks like a real painting. Apart from his unusual talent of using Apple’s gadgets to create portraits, Yamaoka likes to paint the old fashioned way, using watercolor or oil-based paint. Read More »

Artist Ian Davey has found a natural and sustainable canvas to paint his masterpieces on – swan feathers. Now his light works sell for thousands of dollars. Each individual piece can take up to a week to complete, but Ian Davey’s delicate feather paintings really are something special to look at. The 46-year-old artist, who lives in a converted farmhouse in Snowdonia National Park, Wales, paints on swan feathers collected from a nearby swannery. He only uses feathers that naturally fall on the ground during the birds’ annual shedding period and starts the artistic process by cleaning and individually straightening them with tweezers. He always draws a sketch of what he means to paint on the feather, because he only has a one-foot-long, three-inches-wide canvas to work with so he has to know exactly what goes where. He applies a primer and works with a special acrylic paint that protects the feather. To nail the most detailed parts, Ian uses a specialized 000-size brush. Read More »

Artist Karen Eland paints all kinds of portraits and paintings using nothing but beer. The first time we featured Karen Eland on Oddity Central was when she took the art world by storm with her beautiful coffee paintings. She started her artistic career doing portraits with water color and colored pencils, but quickly moved on to painting with coffee, which really helped her make a name for herself. Now, after 14 years of creating art with the world’s favorite breakfast drink, Karen realized there are a lot of other drinks and foods she could experiment with, so she tried tea, beer, liquor, and lots of other stuff, but beer eventually proved the most successful. Read More »

Natalie Irish is one of those artists who doesn’t need to use her hands to create mind-blowing masterpieces. Like someone said, she has more talent in her lips than most do in their entire body.

You probably haven’t seen Natalie’s art before, neither had I, and that’s a real shame because she creates some pretty original stuff. Using only her lips and a lipstick, she creates detailed portraits, like the one of Marilyn Monroe, pictured below.  The Houston-based artist simply puckers her lips and kisses the paper canvas thousands of times, until she gets the desired result.

Get ready for the coolest thing you’ll see all day:

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We’ve seen motherboards used as an art medium before, but Arizona-based artist Joe Dragt took it one step further when he decided to uses the basic computer components as painting canvases.

Joe first got the idea of using motherboards as canvases for his art earlier this year, when his full-time job required him to take more than 30 old computers to be recycled. Looking at that huge stack of computers, the idea just hit him. He thought thought the complexity of the circuits could make motherboards really great backgrounds for his paintings, and during these troubled economic times, they were much cheaper than traditional canvases, too.

He asked if he could take one of the old computer home, to give his idea a go, and it just blossomed from there. He recycles 100% of the computers he uses, meticulously unscrewing every component. He uses the motherboards as canvases, the co0l-looking parts for his sculptures, and sends the rest of the plastic and metal bits to recycling facilities. All potentially harmful elements are taken to a special facility, in Phoenix.

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Robert Burns, a 63-year-old retired decorator from England, has turned the interior of his house into a modern-day Renaissance masterpiece.

After years of painting other people’s houses in boring, pastel colors, Burns got bored. He remembers thinking he had spent 15 years of his life applying the exact shade of magnolia with a paint roller, and was in desperate need of a creative outlet. One day, he bought two books about the Vatican at a car boot sale, and suddenly discovered the Italian Renaissance. Even though he had never been to Florence or Rome, he said to himself “How difficult can this be, I’m a decorator”, and that’s how it all started.

When he started working on his Renaissance interior, the self-taught artist redid his first painting three or four times because he thought it didn’t look good enough, but he soon got the hang of it and began to understand how great classics like Caravaggio or Michaelangelo did their works. While acrylics didn’t seem like the right kind of paint at the beginning, he soon learned they worked quite well if he got the technique right, and now his entire house is painted with acrylics.

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41-year-old Huang Guofu, from Chongqing, China, has learned to master the paintbrush with his mouth and right foot, after he lost both his hands in a childhood accident.

Huang Guofu lost his arms in terrible electric shock accident, at the tender age of four, but that didn’t stop him from following his dreams, and at age 12 he began painting with his feet. The talented artist remembers that in the beginning, his artworks didn’t look at all like what he intended to paint, but as the years went by his skills improved considerably. Huang quit his studies when he was 18, as his father was very ill and he needed to make money for his treatments. He started travelling to other Chinese cities, creating beautiful paintings on the side of streets and selling them to passers-by.

It was during his art travels that he began using his mouth to paint, after hearing some comments that painting with one’s leg isn’t very elegant. He put a brush in his mouth and started painting. During a trip to a city in China’s Sichuan Province, Huang Guofu met Hu Guoui, a woman who quickly fell in love with his strong will and artistic talents, and the two got married in 2000. Since then, she has become his assistant, carrying his canvas and tools, whenever he needs to paint a scene on location.

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Zohreh Etezad Saltaneh is a 49-year-old Iranian artist born with a birth defect that affected the growth of her arms, who manages to paint, weave and do house chores with her feet.

Born in 1962, Zohreh struggled with her condition at first, but says she owes everything she has achieved to her parents, who “brought me up in such a way that I have become self-reliant.“ Chores that once seemed impossible to do with only her feet gradually became easier and, although things like shopping are still a bit challenging, she can now do some things even better than normal people. It has taken her over four decades but “now I have come to terms with this issue. Sometimes when I’m working, I don’t necessarily think ‘these’ are my feet, or that I don’t actually have any hands.”

Zohreh remembers her mother put the paint brush between her toes at a very young age and encouraged to express herself in an artistic way. But not even her mother could have foreseen Zoreh’s success in the artworld – she has received numerous awards and her paintings have been showcased in over 60 national and international exhibitions. She is a member of the International Association of Painters and is currently studying for a masters in psychology. “My slogan has always been: ‘being disabled does not mean being restricted’,” she says, and her life achievement stand as proof.

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