Artist Jordan Mang-osan is a master of pyrography – an incredibly rare and beautiful artform that involves decorating slabs of wood with burn marks. While most other pyrography artists prefer to use specialized tools, Jordan prefers to harness the power of the sun with the help of a magnifying glass. Jordan uses the special technique to create beautiful landscapes and portraits on wood.

To create a piece, he starts off by sketching a design on to a piece of wood. He then uses a magnifying glass to concentrate solar heat on selected areas of the artwork. The heat etches permanent darkened lines into the wood, so intricate that it’s hard to imagine the artist’s hands never really touch the wooden canvas. The work is tedious, however – it takes several months of dedicated effort to manipulate the sun’s rays and etch each detail of the complex pieces.

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Ban Hun Lek is a Thai scrap metal art company that makes amazing pop culture sculptures from discarded auto parts. One of their best works is this Incredible Hulk statue made almost entirely out of rusty old nuts and bolts.

According to the brand’s website, Ban Hun Lek is a family-run business, specializing in hand-made scrap metal art that’s created piece-by-piece from used auto parts that have no value. “Bolts, nuts, screws, spark plugs, and other used auto parts have been re-created by our skillful welders with just a normal electric welding technique,” they wrote. “These art would make great gifts, and are great for collection and decoration.”

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Singaporean artist Ivan Hoo is an ace at creating optical illusions. Using pastels and pencils on wood, he illustrates highly realistic objects such as spilled cola, cracked eggs, broken vases and crumpled paper. It all looks three-dimensional until you touch it and realise that it’s not.

Ivan said that he chose to work with wood because of its texture and the way it holds color. “By working on wood, it gives me a lot of dimension and ideas to create something close to reality and it works really well with pastels too,” he explained.

“I started to experiment on wood some years back with mainly portraits as my subject before going further with a different concept,” he added. “I started to think of ideas and draw things that we could see ‘happening’ on a piece of wood, so the very first idea that struck me was the dripping effect. That was my first anamorphic work.”

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Peter Combe is a San Francisco-based visual artist who specializes in creating three-dimensional artwork using nothing but paint swatches, hand-punched into small disks. Using his special technique, Combe creates stunning pieces that range from abstract pattern-based compositions to highly realistic pixelated portraits with a vintage photograph-like quality.

Combe has a huge collection of paint swatch disks of over 1,100 colors that he has organized based on tonal increments and light-reflecting values. This enables him to think of tones rather than colors while working. To create a piece, he fits these disks into bezel-cut grooves on a specially prepared archival material, with the aid of a vintage operating-theater lamp.

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To pay tribute to Serbian inventor and electrical engineering genius Nikola Tesla, artist Phil Hansen recently created a portrait of him using only electric sparks.

A time lapse video of Hansen creating the painting shows him connecting a couple of wires to a large battery. He then brings the two naked ends of the wire together to produce sparks. He uses the sparks to create burn marks of varying darkness on paper, creating the eyes, nose and other features of Tesla’s face until the mind-blowing portrait is complete.

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While most graphic designers use high-tech software to create images, Álvaro Franca has chosen to return to the basics. Using a vintage typewriter, he creates incredibly detailed portraits of his favorite authors.

Franca begins the process by creating a reference image on his computer. This allows him to plan out the areas of light and dark shading on the portrait. Once the reference is ready, he uses it as a guide and proceeds to choose the letters and the number of strikes he needs to achieve the desired level of darkness.

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Satoshi Araki, an artist from Tokyo, creates highly realistic miniature models of towns, vehicles, and a lot of other objects from everyday life. He is particularly skilled at making small-scale dioramas of chaotic cityscapes that are affected by urban decay, pollution, or warfare.

Satoshi mostly uses styrofoam board to make these incredibly intricate and complex models – he cuts them down to the desired shape and size, paints them, and then glues them together. He explains on his blog that he uses Google Image Search to pull up images that he later uses as a visual reference. These images help him create scenes that are very life-like, down to the smallest detail.

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Xu Shuquan, a retired primary school teacher from Chengdu city in Sichuan Province, has dedicated the past 60 years to folding paper planes. The 70-year-old now has a collection of 10,000 planes of different sizes, colors and shapes, in addition to various paper dolls and models of the 12 zodiac signs.

What’s so great about a grown man making paper planes, you ask? Well, Xu’s planes aren’t like those simple ones that kids make. He uses a complicated ancient origami-like folding technique called ‘Zhezhi’ to make a variety of aircraft models – from jumbo jets to fighter planes.

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Who knew that a child’s meaningless doodles could have so much potential? Toronto-based artist Ruth Oosterman takes creativity to a whole new level by converting her two-year-old daughter Eve’s scribbles into beautiful paintings.

Ruth is so artistic that she is able to transform Eve’s random lines into recognizable shapes. A random curve becomes an elephant’s ear, and crooked lines become the gnarled branches of a tree. Nothing seems to escape her eye – she can spot the outline of a woman’s face or the hooked nose of a bird where most people would just see haphazard scratches.

It all started by accident when Eve discovered her mother’s ink pen and loved using it. “That was part of the reason I used watercolor on that very first drawing because I knew the beautiful effect it would have on the paper. The ink pen marks immediately become a type of paint once you touch it with a wet paintbrush. It makes it easier to blend into the colors I add and also adds a dark intensity that I wouldn’t be able to create otherwise.”

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The paintings of Mexican artist Cristiam Ramos are, quite literally, like a breath of minty fresh air! The 34-year-old creates celebrity portraits using nothing but tubes of ordinary toothpaste. Some of his notable works include paintings of Robin Williams, Miley Cyrus, Emma Watson, Lady Gaga and Sir Elton John. They’ve all been crafted using various brands of the oral hygiene product.

Painting with toothpaste is a lot harder than it sounds, and Ramos spends up to 200 hours and 30 tubes on a single piece. “It is very difficult to make these as the toothpaste becomes very sticky and dries quickly,” he explained. “The smell can also be overwhelming, which was challenging during the long days of up to 10 hours painting.”

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While some men like to leave their bushy chests intact, others prefer to stay groomed with a trim or a wax. And then there are a few fuzzy fellas who like putting an artistic spin on body hair. Helping the trend ‘grow’ is British celebrity hair stylist Daniel Johnson, who has been wielding his clippers to create skylines and iconic landmarks on the chests of hairy Brits.

Having cut the hair of English football giants like Ashley Cole, Gareth Blue and Erik Lamela, 32-year-old Daniel is now channeling all his talent and experience towards men who want to do interesting things with their chest hair. He calls the art ‘manscaping’, and his project is being sponsored by male grooming brand Braun.

Daniel said that he was inspired to take on the challenge after he came to know of the #chesthairbikini Instagram movement, where men trimmed their chest to resemble to shape of a bikini. Of course, his work is a lot more complicated and intricate. Once he’s done trimming and carving, the finished design consists of hair at five specific lengths – 0mm, 1mm, 2mm, 5mm and 15mm. This is a tough thing to do because chest hair is a lot shorter and curlier than hair on the head.

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Through her work, artist and illustrator Yulia Brodskaya demonstrates that you don’t need complicated tools or expensive materials to create brilliant art. She works with simple materials used in everyday life – paper and glue. Using a technique known as quilling, she weaves multi-colored strips of paper into breathtaking three-dimensional patterns.

Yulia, who started her career as a graphic designer and illustrator in 2006, quickly abandoned computer programs to work with paper. “I believe that one of the main reasons I enjoy the paper craft, is due to my love of the material: paper,” she explained.

“I’ve always had a special fascination for paper, it has taken me a while to find my own way of working with it. Now I draw with paper instead of on it. And then it took a little longer to find out that the technique I have been using so intensively is called quilling – it involves the use of strips of paper that can be rolled, shaped, and glued to the background.”

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British artist Chris Wood creates breathtaking pieces of art using only two simple things – light and glass. He is an expert at painstakingly arranging small squares of delicate glass that reflect light in a certain way, thereby creating exquisitely colorful light patterns that dazzle the eye.

Chris uses dichroic (two-color) glass, containing a special coating that alters the wavelength of light. So when he directs light through his wall-mounted glass structure, the glass alters the color and direction of the reflected light, resulting in a complex array of colors in continually changing patterns.

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Svitlana Postlega is a talented Ukrainian artist who recreates iconic paintings using plasticine. Her portfolio consists of three-dimensional replicas of some of the most famous works of art in history, such as The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci, and Kissing by Alex Gray.

43-year-old Svitlana makes a living as an economist at the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. She took up plasticine modelling as a way to relax and forget her problems. She often works throughout the night to fight depression, which she developed as a result of her divorce.

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When you go to Rob Ferrel for a haircut, you know you’re in for something really special. The professional hair artist can sculpt logos, designs, patterns and even celebrity faces on a head of hair. He runs his own salon called Rob the Original Barbershop, in San Antonio, where he works his magic every single day.

At first glance, some of Ferrel’s customers look like they’ve got stuff painted on the back of their heads. But take a closer look and you’ll realize that it’s all hair. Super-talented Ferrel discovered his special gift only eight years ago, when a kid walked into the barbershop he worked at and asked for a small little swirl.

“From there I started doing stars and more complex designs, team logos” he said. “And then I wanted to do something different and stand out, so I did portraits. Now if they bring me any image, I can replicate it in their hair”. Back in 2006, Ferrel’s clients had to bring him images of the portraits they wanted, but now, with the help of modern technology, he can just look up the image on his phone and sculpt it freehand, using regular tools like trimmers and clippers.

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