Allan Pachino Wallace is a young, talented artist from Nassau, the Bahamas, who recently rose to internet fame with a series of amazing celebrity portraits made only with salt, coffee or baking soda.

Wallace works with all kinds of mediums, from common oil paint and spray paint, to tree leaves and cereal. A quick look at his social media profiles on Facebook or Instagram reveals the versatility and talent of this young artist, but the internet only learned about it after he shared a salt portrait of actor/comedian Kevin Hart on his Facebook page. People loved it and got shared so much that Kevin Hart himself saw it and publicly congratulated Allan on his work.

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28-year-old Irakli Nadar is considered one of the most talented digital artists of our time. Using only digital painting tools, he is able to create photo-like portraits from scratch. His works are so good that many in the digital art world accuse him of simply applying various filters to digital photographs and passing them off as paintings.

You could say that Irakli Nadar’s amazing skill is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, his breathtaking artworks have brought him worldwide fame and legions of adoring fans on various social networks, but his success and enviable skill have also made him the target of criticism from both rival artists and the average internet trolls. Luckily, he has learned to live with both, and says that tough as it sometimes is, he just ignores the haters and focuses on the positive.

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26-year-old Kel Cruz, an artist from Quezon City, Philippines, is being hailed as a “pixel art wizard”, for his mind-blowing pixelated portraits created with everything from bits of scotch tape and matchsticks, to fingerprints and blood stains.

Cruz, who works as a male nurse, used to create pixelated art the old fashioned way, with a ballpoint pen. But then a rival artist challenged his artistic talent, accusing him that he was using a printer to create his detailed portraits. That inspired him to stop relying so heavily on conventional tools and start exploring unusual mediums. Since then, he has used lipstick, colored tape, rubber stamps, beer and even woven pieces of paper to create some truly awe-inspiring masterpieces.

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Noel Cruz, a Filipino-American artist based in Anaheim, specializes in repainting mass-produced celebrity and character dolls, like those made by Mattel, into hyper-realistic miniature models of the people that inspired them. The results of his meticulous work are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Born and raised in Manila, the Philippines, Noel Cruz has been drawing and painting people’s faces for most of his life. It all started when he was 12 years old, when, while looking through a neighbor’s window, he saw a telecast of the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant on television. Seeing so many beautiful faces all at once inspired him to start drawing portraits on pieces of paper. At age 16, having undergone no specialized training, Cruz was already selling portraits as commissioned work. But he only discovered the fascinating world of repainted dolls several years later, after emigrating to the United States with his family.

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We often hear about the insane amounts of trash we as a species currently generate, but words and figures don’t make a very big impact on most people. Images work much better, so one French artist decided to actually show just how much trash a single human being generates over time. To do that, he stopped throwing away recyclable trash for four years.

Antoine Repessé stopped throwing away recyclable waste like plastic bottles, toilet paper tubes or newspapers back in 2011, storing it in his apartment, instead. That wasn’t a big issue at first, but as time went by, trash started covering the floor of his home, and soon began piling up and covering every available space. After four years of collecting trash, Repessé’s apartment ended up looking like the home of one of those extreme hoarders you see on TLC.

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Some people are just born with an insane amount of talent. Take 31-year-old Nikola Čuljić, a self-taught artist from Serbia. He has been actively drawing for only three years, yet look at the wonders that he’s able to produce with some pencils, markers and pastels.

People had always told Nikola Čuljić that he had a talent for drawing, but he just wasn’t very interested in it. Then, three years ago, he decided to give it a shot, so he started drawing ultra-realistic portraits. That turned out to be very hard, and the young artist realized that he wasn’t very good at it, or, at least not as good as he wanted to be. Čuljić wanted to be the best, and anything less than that just didn’t satisfy him, so he decided to try something different. And that’s how he got into hand-drawn 3D illusions.

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Laetitia KY, a young fashion designer from the Ivory Coast, recently went viral on social media for an original photo series where she sculpts her long hair into a variety of shapes, from human hands, to bunny ears and even the African continent.

KY says that she has always been fascinated by hairdressing, but got the idea for creative hair art a year ago, while admiring the intricate hairstyles of women from various African tribes. She found them amazing and they inspired her to use her own hair as a means of artistic expression. The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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A 22-year-old French makeup artist recently caused quite a lot of dropped jaws on Twitter with a set of photos of a “painting” whose protagonist turned out to be a living, breathing model.

I don’t know if that opening line made any sense to you (probably not), but what 22-year-old Kenza managed to do is best explained in pictures, not words. Inspired by the work of Alexa Meade, an exceptionally talented artist whose mind-boggling masterpieces we featured a few years ago, the aspiring makeup artist painted a human model with broad brushstrokes to create the illusion that she was actually a character in a painting, and not a real live person. I think she pulled it off magnificently, and so do the tens of thousands of people who liked and shared her pics on social media.

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If you’re looking for the perfect place to take an Instagram-worthy photo in Los Angeles, these three completely pink houses in the city’s Pico neighborhood are bound to catch people’s attention.

The question “what would Barbie’s house look like in real life?” has just been answered courtesy of Los Angeles artist Matty Mo, a.k.a @themostfamousartist. He was asked by M-Rad Architecture, a local housing developer, to create some buzz about their new project, a a 45-unit apartment complex to be built on the lot currently occupied by three abandoned houses. Mo and his company, The Mural Agency, specialize in “‘Instagrammable’ experiences as a service for brand partners worldwide,” and in this particular case, they decided to paint the three houses completely pink, before they are demolished.

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Ever take a look at your Facebook friend list and wonder ‘how many of these people are actually my friends?” Well, artist Tanja Hollander did, and after thinking about if for a while, she decided to find out the answer to that question by visiting all of her 626 Facebook friends. She documented the experience in an epic 5-year-long project called “Are You Really My Friend?”

It all started on New Year’s Eve 2010, when, after conversing with some of her online friends, Maine-based artist Tanja Hollander stared wondering what her relationship with all the people in her Facebook list was. She asked herself if friendships formed online were as real as offline ones and if many of her “friends” were actually just acquaintances. “Am I really friends with all these people?” Tanja told herself, and she immediately knew she had to find out.

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Looking at Toshihiko Hosaka’s incredibly detailed sculptures, it’s hard to believe that they are made from grainy beach sand, and not some sort of clay. But he only uses sand, his talent and 20-years of experience.

43-year-old Hosaka has been making sand sculptures ever since he was in school, and has been honing his skills for over two decades. Today, he is able to create large-scale masterpieces without any molds or adhesives, only simple sand and a handful of metal sculpting tools. He spends hours, sometimes several days sculpting away at mounds of moist sand, but the result is always breathtaking.

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A DIY master from Tokyo, Japan, recently conquered the internet with a very unusual project. She set out to turn a pair of cheap high-heel shoes into realistic-looking pigeons to see if they would allow her to get closer to the real birds in a local park without them flying away. Did it work? Read on and find out.

47-year old Keiko Ohata creates all kinds of wondrous things and posts photos of them on Japanese DIY-themed community website, Nifty. She has shared dozens of interesting creations with her followers over the last 11 years, but it was her latest idea that attracted the attention of some of the world’s largest art blogs and news sites. Well, sort of, as all the articles I’ve seen got her name all wrong and linked to a Russian site as the original source, instead of her Nifty profile. Hopefully, they’ll make the necessary corrections, as Keiko deserves all the credit for this amazing pair of pigeon shoes.

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If you live in New York City, chances are you’ve already stumbled across a most peculiar sight – a public trash containing a large, colorful arrangement of flowers, making it look like a giant vase. They have been popping up all around the Big Apple, stopping people in their tracks and putting a smile on their faces.

The unusual flower vases are the work of Lewis Miller, a local floral designer who uses leftover flowers and decorative plants from weddings and other events to add a bit of color to the grey, gloomy sidewalks of NYC. He and his team at Lewis Miller Design look for the most attractive garbage cans in the city and get up early in the morning to fill them with dozens of beautiful flower, eventually turning them into huge vases. Following a popular Vogue article on this unique project, Miller and his team have come to be known as the “flower bandits” of New York.

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Most artists take decades to master their tools, but at 23 years of age, Alfredo Chamal is already one of the world’s best ball-point pen artists in the world. He specializes in hyper-realistic drawings that look like artistic photographs from afar. It’s only when the viewer approaches the artwork to take a closer look that he realizes it is actually a hand-drawn large-scale drawing, and not a photograph.

Made famous by by Spanish illustrator Juan Casas, the ball-point pen is not the most popular art tool in the world, partly because of it’s permanent effect which makes covering up any mistakes very difficult. But that din’t stop Alfredo Chamal from using the tool to experiment contemporary realism. Based on photographs he takes himself, Alfredo’s large scale drawings take several days to complete, but the end result is always more than worth the effort that goes into them.

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After “diligently” saving up colorful Straburst candy wrappers for nearly five years, a Pennsylvania woman linked over 10,000 of them together to create a beautiful dress.

Making a dress out of waxed paper candy wrappers might sound silly to some people, but for Emily Seilhamer, of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, it was a monumental undertaking that took half a decade to complete. It all started in college, when she met her husband Malachi, who happened to be a big fan of Starburst candy. When they first met, he offered her a pack of Starburst, and kept bringing her candy on dates. At one point, Emily realized she could make something out of all the wrappers, and asked him to save them for her. So he would eat them and bring her grocery bags full of the colorful pieces of paper.

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