Osaka-based artist Mito Nishikura painstakingly recycles plastic bottle caps into tiny artworks by painstakingly painting detailed landscapes on them.

We’ve seen bottle caps being used as mosaic pieces in the past, but Japanese artist Mito Nishikura has a different way of using them for artistic purposes. At first glance, plastic bottle caps don’t really make the best pointing canvases – at least not individually – because of their very limited surface, but the talented Japanese illustrator has found a way to create detailed works of art on these tiny bits of plastic.

Photo: Mito Nishikura/Twitter

The discarded plastic bottle caps Mito Nishikura uses as canvases for her tiny painted masterpieces have a diameter of just 3 millimeters, That seems hardly enough to paint a very simplistic composition on, let alone an actual work of art. And yet, the young Japanese artist somehow makes it work…

Nishikura, a graduate of the Kyoto Saga University of Art, only started painting on plastic bottle caps in June of this year, but her artworks have already attracted the attention of tiny art enthusiasts on social media. And for good reason, they are quite something to behold.

“I really want to know if you create your artworks with a magnifying glass, because it’s really hard to paint such details with only the naked eye,” one Twitter user commented on one of Mito Nishikura’s artworks.

“How on earth can you paints such a small painting?” someone else asked.

In case yoou were wondering, the talented Japanese artist confirmed that she doesn’t use a magnifying glass when painting, and even a posted a small clip of herself working on a tiny masterpiece, on Twitter. She just holds the bottle cap in one hand, using two fingers, and painstakingly adds strokes of paint with a very fine paintbrush.

With such a small surface to work with, every stroke counts, so Nishikura can’t afford to make any mistakes. That’s why a single bottle cap can take up to 3 hours to pains. But as you can see, that is time very well spent!

Mito Nishikura’s masterpieces reminded us of another series of impressive tiny artworks we featured a while back – the coin-painted wonders of Brianna ‘Bry’ Marie.

For more of Mito Nishikura’s bottle cap paintings, keep an eye on her fast-growing artistic collection.