There’s more to the animal portraits painted by Florida-based artist Shannon Holt than meets the eye. If you look carefully, you’ll notice the canvases are actually human bodies contorted into just the right position.

The expert body-painter spends between 6 and 12 hours instructing the models to adopt the right stance and painstakingly painting every little detail of the animal she brings to life through her art. After experimenting with various mediums, Holt decided the skin was the perfect medium to express her talent. “The body was the final surface I tried before I decided skin was the key to making my work successful,” she said. “I love it because it happened automatically and beautifully with no planning – it’s a perfect creative example of how cool body painting can be. It can transform into two different images with the repositioning of the model’s arms and hands.”

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Andy Huot, a mechanical engineer from Louisville, Kentucky, spends his free time looking for recognizable shapes in bags of Cheetos Cheese Curls. Over the past year, he has spent hours opening bag after bag of the high-calorie snack, examining each nugget of puffed corn with the concentration of a museum curator. He takes photographs of all his exciting finds and shares them on Instagram for his 40,000 + followers to see.

It all started last October, when Andy was working on an invention at home. He got hungry, so he simply grabbed a bag of Cheetos and dug right in. Because his ‘creative mind’ was already at work, he began to spot seemingly ‘humanoid’ pieces. Intrigued, he clicked a few photographs with his phone and shared them with his friends and family who found it very funny.

So he set up ‘Cheese Curls of Instagram’, an account where he only posts ‘pictures of Cheetos that resemble things’. Within hours, he began to get hundreds of likes and comments. “I didn’t expect this response,” he admitted. “It motivated me to keep going to try harder.” So he did just that. By the end of last year, he had amassed a huge following with comments like: “this is the most unique and epic page on Instagram”.

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If you look carefully at Armenian artist Davit Yukhanyan’s meticulously intricate illustrations, you’ll realize that they actually consist of hundreds of smaller illustrations that make up the form, background and shading of the main drawing.

The incredibly talented 26-year-old has been drawing and creating for as long as he can remember. Although he works as an architect now, he tries to draw whenever he finds the time. “Drawing is my passion and music is my inspiration,” he said.

For his ‘drawings within a drawing’, he uses a technical pen and paper, and makes them entirely by hand with no digital manipulation. “Just as everything in our world consists of different pieces, my drawing also consists of different pieces in the form of small illustrations that come together into one overall creation,” he said. “I draw the artwork with this concept in mind.”

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Who knew that steely cold surgical tools could be used to produce exquisite, intricate architectural models? Renowned British artist Damien Hirst did just that – he used a vast number of surgical instruments and metal objects such as scalpels, stitching needles, razor blades, hooks, iron filings and safety-pins to create wonderfully detailed collages called ‘Black Scalpel Cityscapes’.

For his recent exhibition at White Cube Gallery in Brazil, he selected 17 cities that are either recent sites of conflict, cities relating to his own life, or centers of political or religious significance – including Rome and the Vatican City, Leeds, Beijing, Moscow, London and New York.

To create a collage, Hirst gathers as many surgical tools and scrap metal as possible and then begins the arduous process of delicately arranging them to replicate the aerial view of a city. He then adds some local flavor to each collage. For instance, the view of Paris is contains a few French francs and tourist souvenirs, while Vatican City has silver religious medallions. Moscow’s miniature roads sparkle with shards of mirror.

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Artist and photographer Bill Fink is the creator of ‘Time and Matter Photography’, an amazing art form that involves producing photograph-like images out of virtually any material or matter. So instead of conventional materials like silver halide or inkjet, the 60-year-old artist uses hair, human ashes, soil and anything else you can think of to painstakingly create photo-like images.

Some of Bill’s most notable works include a portrait called ‘My Eye’ – made entirely from his own hair, ‘Flowers’ – made entirely from the pollen of those flowers, ‘Quaker Oats’ – a picture made with Quaker Oats, and the image of a man named Bob, made using his ashes. These pictures look just like vintage photographs; nothing betrays the unique technique used to produce them.

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Canadian novelist and artist Douglas Coupland organised a colorful, albeit sticky, art project in May this year – he invited people to stick chewed up wads of gum on a seven-foot fiberglass statue of his own head.

Located on Howe Street outside Vancouver Art Gallery, the aptly named ‘Gumhead’ statue was a part of Coupland’s ‘everywhere is anywhere and anything is everything’ exhibition. By the time it was taken down on September 1, the statue was covered in gum to the last inch. And it had all melted thanks to the summer heat, resulting in a sweet sticky mess that attracted wasps and bees.

Coupland called it a total success, describing Gumhead as ‘ugly-beautiful’. “At first the added gum looked like jewels against the black,” he said. “And then the Excel chewing gum van parked beside it during the Jazz Festival and took the whole head to the next level. And then we had a heat wave and the gum started to weep. And now it has a 24-hours cloud of bees and wasps around it. It’s a dream.”

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Israeli artist Maor Zabar’s creations look deceptively delicious, but they are meant to be worn not devoured. He uses felt, plastic and wire to create incredibly realistic models of delicious dishes and incorporates them into fashionable headgear. Some of his clever designs include a berry pie beret, an outdoor picnic fascinator, and even a salad sombrero.

36-year-old Zabar began designing the hats a couple of years ago, when he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. “When I discovered I had Crohn’s disease, I was forced to start a special diet and was unable to eat many of the foods I have always loved,” he revealed. “So instead of eating them, I created them out of felt and fibers and made them into beautiful fascinators.” And although he’s cured of his illness now, he still loves adding new designs to his Food Hat Collection.

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Thomas Yang’s art is simple, minimal, and brilliant. The Singapore-based designer/illustrator couples his artistic talent with his passion for cycling to produce ‘bike print illustrations’ of world famous landmarks with bicycle tire tracks.

Thomas calls the series ‘100 copies’, because it is limited to, well, 100 prints per piece. The series consists of illustrations of some of the world’s most notable architectural landmarks, made using only the bike tires coated with black pigment.

Some of the most popular works in the series include illustrations of the London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, and the Empire State Building. Each piece comes stamped with a quirky name and edition number, along with its own special bike-themed description.

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Brazilian artist João Carvalho may be only 15 years old, but his incredible talent more than makes up for his lack of experience. The young artist can completely transform plain paper into ruled notebook sheets with 3D illusions popping out of them.

He starts by drawing blue lines on a blank sheet, but distorts them and adds intense shadows at just the right places, adding depth to his dessigns and creating the effect of three dimensional shapes that seem to jump off the page.

Some of these shapes include popular characters like Homer Simpson, Scooby Doo, and Jerry the mouse. He also creates effects like ripples of flowing water and wrinkled paper.

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Italian performance artist Sven Sachsalber is basing his latest work on an age old figure of speech. He’s going spend two whole days looking for a needle in a haystack. Well, people have been talking about it for so long, I say it’s about time someone actually gave it a try!

For two days this week – Thursday and Friday – 27-year-old Sven will be combing a stack of hay in search of that elusive pre-inserted needle, at Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art gallery in Paris.

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Artist Michael Grab is a master of rock balancing – he can pile them up in all sorts of gravity-defying formations, and believe it or not, there’s no glue involved.

Michael calls his art a ‘contemplative stone arrangement’ that involves ‘patience, adaptation, slow-breathing, steady hands and a plethora of other practiced skills’. His project, called ‘Gravity Glue’, has him balancing rocks of all shapes and capturing the impossible-looking structures on camera.

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Hollywood artist Jon Neill’s pumpkin carvings are so scary they might just give you nightmares this Halloween. The big, wrinkly faces and mouths full of crooked teeth are so life-like and rich in detail that it’s hard to believe they’re actually made of plain old pumpkins.

Neill, originally from Kansas City, has been carving pumpkins ever since he was a boy. His family used to grow them, and over the years, his traditional jack-o-lanterns morphed into creepy works of art. But his skills didn’t receive recognition until a few years ago, when the San Fernando Valley resident turned pro. He auditioned for the TV show Halloween Wars as a pumpkin artist, for which he made a few time-lapse videos of himself at work. When one of those videos was put up on YouTube, it started to receive thousands of hits, and he soon became known as one of the world’s best pumpkin carving artists.

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Apparently, there’s much more to a pink flower than meets the eye – there’s also gold, orange, yellow, purple, blue and red.How do we know this? Well, it’s all thanks to tetrachromats like Concetta Antico. Her unique condition enables her to see 100 times more color than the average person.

“My world speaks to me very strongly and then I can’t wait to paint it,” said Concetta, an artist based in San Diego. “I’ve been told that you see gray, mostly, in a shadow. Well, shadows are fabulous. I see emerald greens, I see magentas, I see lilacs, I see blues.”

The reason for Concetta’s amazing ability to see the world from a different perspective is the extra receptors in her eyes. Most people have three types of cones – structures in the eye that are designed to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain – in their eyes. But tetrachromats like Concetta have four cones, so while the average person can only see 1 million colors, they can potentially view 99 million!

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You can say Chinese artist Han Xiaoming has great ‘taste’ in art – he actually uses his tongue as a brush to create paintings! Luckily, he doesn’t use oil paints or acrylic, just sweetened food dye.

Han, 35, claims he came up with the technique while trying his hand at traditional Chinese sugar painting. The ancient art form involves the use of melted sugar to create figures such as dragons, monkeys, fish, dogs, birds and flowers. Halfway through his work, however, sweet-toothed Han got hungry and decided to take a sip of the sugary paints used to paint the sugar artworks. He loved the taste so much that he finally ended up abandoning the paintbrush and continued to paint with his tongue. Eventually, he completely switched to using his tongue as a tool for his art.

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Lucia Pittalis, an Italian makeup artist and portrait painter, is a master of disguise – she can give herself a whole new identity with just a few strokes of makeup. All she needs are a few cosmetics, makeup tools, and wigs. The 43-year-old mostly chooses to turn herself into famous musicians, actors and fictional characters – both male and female.

Some of Lucia’s most epic transformations have been into iconic figures such as Marlon Brando, Walter White, and Bette Davis. She has also morphed into pop icons like Iggy Azalea, and movie characters like Rambo, Rocky, and Don Vito Corleone.

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