Jay Freestyle, a South African tattoo artist based in Amsterdam, creates incredible, ethereal tattoos. And here’s the surprising bit – he works without a plan. It’s impossible to tell by looking at his work, but the 29-year-old inks freehand, making it all up as he goes. He works with only one motto: “Give me a piece of your skin and I’ll give you a piece of my soul.”

It doesn’t matter how many ideas you have in your head about your tattoo before you visit Jay. Once you speak to him and realize what he can do, you’re just going to turn around and say ‘Go for it, I trust you blindly’. So far, he has never disappointed a single client.

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25-year-old Ryosuke Ohtake is a master craftsman who recently tried his hand at ‘jizai okimono’ – the Japanese art of carving realistic wooden animals, complete with movable joints. He created a near-perfect lobster entirely out of boxwood. The sculpture is so life-like that when lifted, its claws, legs and tail move in the exact same way that a real, live lobster would.

A three-minute video clip that shows Ohtake working on the lobster with his various sculpting tools and blocks of wood, has become very popular online. In the video, he lifts the finished sculpture in his hands and shows exactly how each part moves. The details are simply mind-blowing.

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Not all forms of wall graffiti are acceptable – most are viewed as vandalism. But in the case of French street artist Patrick Commecy, homeowners actually invite him to paint on their walls. Along with his team of muralists, he transforms boring, dull patches of wall into vibrant scenes, full of life. In fact unless you have a ‘before’ picture, you might not even realize it’s a painting.

Patrick and his team travel across France, painting hyper-realistic windows and balconies on bare walls that resemble the rest of the building. They dress up these painted windows with plants, birds and sometimes even rocks and waterfalls. It all looks so real that it’s confusing for a moment – it’s hard to tell the difference between a real tree and the painted one.

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One day, 13 years ago, when retired fan maker John Brooker realized that his hedge was way too boring, he decided to do something about it. Since then, he has been sculpting it into a wonderful, mystical creature – a gigantic 150-foot long, 20-foot tall dragon, complete with a massive pair of wings and six sets of legs.

The dragon topiary – with its bulging eyes, flaring nostrils and crested back – is truly one-of-a-kind. Mr. Brooker, now 75, said: “I was standing at my kitchen sink one day and thought the hedge was boring so decided to do something with it. I think the dragon came from my days in the Army. I did two tours in Malaysia so the dragon must have been in my subconscious.”

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Jason Gamrath is a master glassblower from Seattle. His work primarily involves creating enormous, yet incredibly life-like orchids and carnivorous flowers using his expert glass blowing techniques. Through his art, he wants to help people appreciate the minute details of the plant kingdom on a magnified level.

Jason’s glass orchids are gigantic – each one is bigger than a human head. But Jason doesn’t compromise on detailing. The colors are vivid and all the features of real flowers are accurately represented on his glass replicas. “The purpose of creating this series on a macro scale is to bring to light the beauty that exists within the micro scale of nature,” he said. He wants to force people to notice the details that they’re prone to miss while ‘walking around as a big person’.

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If you thought painting bird feathers was difficult, wait till you check out this super-talented artist who paints on bird feathers. That’s right, Connecticut-based Brenda Lyons paints the most stunning animal portraits using moulted turkey feathers as a canvas, as a part of her ongoing series called ‘Painted Feathers’.

I seriously appreciate the kind of work Brenda does, because I can’t even hold something so delicate without eventually destroying it. And to actually apply acrylic paints directly on these feathers to create something so beautiful – it just blows my mind.

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43-year-old Fabian Gaete is an artist who specializes in finger painting. He’s so good at his craft that he can actually create small finger oil paintings of breathtaking landscapes in under three minutes.

Fabian currently works his magic on the streets of Puerto Montt, Chile, where his ‘live creations’ are sold at six euros each (or 10 euros for three). He moves around with a large black suitcase filled with oil paints and glass panels. As soon as he receives a request for a painting, he quickly uses his fingers to fill the panels with mountains, trees, rivers, waterfalls and more. In no time at all, the painting is completed, sealed and handed over to its new owner.

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Dmitry Tihonenko, from Belarus, is a household-appliance repairman with a passion for everything steampunk. Although he primarily uses his workshop to fix broken appliances, he has this amazing hobby going on on the side – creating steampunk masterpieces out of mundane, everyday objects.

You have to to admit that even though modern appliances make our lives a lot easier, design-wise they are not always as cool-looking as we’d like . They’re most often mass-produced, plastic replicas of each other. But that’s where Dmitry comes in – he takes boring appliances and converts them into something truly wonderful, as you can see in the pictures.

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Millie Brown, a British Performance artist previously known for her superior regurgitating skills, is now making headlines for a new artistic endeavor – surviving on nothing but water for a week. We had covered Millie’s story in 2011, back in her regurgitating days, when she used to swallow gallons of colored milk and puke it all onto a canvas. At one point, she was widely popular as the girl who threw up all over Lady Gaga in a music video, but she’s apparently setting her sights on starvation as an art form these days.

Millie has placed herself on display, enclosed in the Hatbox, a gallery space at the Refinery Hotel in New York. She’s surrounded by a carpet of freshly-cut flowers, and she plans to remain completely removed from the outside world for 168 hours straight. During this time, the 27-year-old will sustain herself solely on water.

Millie joins the ranks of several performance artists across the world who’ve done weird things to themselves in the name of art. Like this guy who lived inside a bear carcass for 13 days, and these two artists who lived in a hamster wheel for 10 days. Millie’s challenge began on Friday, as a part of NYC’s Frieze Art Week. “I wanted to create a performance that embodied the transience of life,” she said.

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We’ve seen lots of artists creating portraits that look like photographs, but very few have come as close to the real thing as Sheryl Luxenberg. Her work is fittingly called ‘hyperrealism’ – her paintings are just too real to be true. You probably need to stare at them for hours to spot one feature that doesn’t look utterly lifelike.

Sheryl is an award-winning visual artist living in Ottawa, Ontario. On her websites, she says that she tries to present the objectivity of her subjects, taking advantage of illusionistic depth and emphasizing with paint a flattened three dimensional look. I’m an art-dummy, so I really have no idea what that means. But it’s apparently the hallmark quality of the Photorealism Art Movement that began in the United States in the late 1960s.

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A small school in Izhevsk, the capital city of Russia’s Udmurtia region, probably has the best groundskeeper in the world. Not only is he great at his job and popular with the students, he’s also super-creative. On snowy winter days, he regularly delights the school staff and students with large artworks drawn in the schoolyard with his snow shovel.

51-year-old Seymon Bukharin uses the snow as his canvas and a shovel for a paintbrush. With the shovel, he sweeps the snow to create fantastic designs, like a ship sailing on the high seas, animals and birds, or traditional Russian scenes. The students love nothing more than to admire his masterpieces from their classroom windows, and only wish they had more time to lend a hand with the artistic process.

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I must admit, ever since I found artist Heather Rooney’s YouTube channel, I’ve been hooked! She posts all these time lapse videos of her incredibly realistic colored pencil portraits, and, well, you have to see what she’s capable of doing with a few colored pencils. Watching her draw is just as fascinating as looking at the finished artworks, which all look unbelievably life-like. I’ve just spent a good hour watching videos of her drawing some of my favorite celebrities, and I’m definitely going back for more.

One of Heather’s most popular works is a rendition of the famous Hollywood selfie picture (featuring major stars like Brad Pitt, Ellen DeGeneres, Jennifer Lawrence and more) taken at this year’s Oscars. The amount of detailing that she’s put into the features of each of the celebrities is simply mind-blowing. Her artwork was featured by every major art site on the internet when she first posted it, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg, believe me. This girl has dozens of incredible portraits just waiting to be discovered.

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John Reid, a balloon artist from New York, built the world’s largest balloon sculpture (made by a single person) last Friday. He got to work on Thursday morning at the Salt Lake Comic Con FanXperience event and spent the next several hours inflating thousands of colored balloons at his booth.

42 hours later he had put together a 50-foot tall Transformers robot, ‘Poptimus’ Prime, using 4,302 purple, green, white, black and gray balloons. It was so tall that it actually couldn’t fit upright in the convention center. Reid and 10 other volunteers had to struggle a bit to bring it into a kneeling position. The robot is said to be invincible, except for one weakness – needles!

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11-year-old Dušan Krtolica is a child prodigy artist from Serbia who creates mind-blowing drawings of wildlife. The fifth grade student at ‘Laza Kostic’ school in New Belgrade first began to draw when he was only two years old. He has already had three national solo exhibitions to his name – the first two by the age of eight. Dušan’s drawings are mostly pen-and-pencil works of various species of animals, both alive and extinct. He draws prehistoric animals, birds, insects, and also legendary knights.

Dušan’s knowledge of the animal world is remarkable. He knows about all the geological eras, and which animals roamed the earth during those periods. He knows all the 65 species of marsupials and can effortlessly recite their names. And when his parents bought him the most comprehensive encyclopedia of animals, it took him less than three weeks to learn it word for word. “I would have studied animals and published a book about them, but I’m going to draw all of them,” said Dušan, whose ambition is to become a Zoologist when he grows up.

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This pencil portrait of an old man looks unbelievably realistic, down to the reflection in the pupils, and it’s hard to believe that it was actually drawn by a teenager. For her incredible masterpiece, 16-year-old artist Shania McDonagh won the top prize at this year’s Texaco Children’s Art Competition. She was judged the best in the senior age category, for students aged 16 to 18 years old.

Texaco Children’s Art Competition is an art contest held for kids in Ireland, every year since 1955. Shania, a student at Mount St. Michael Secondary School in Claremorris, has been taking part in the contest for the past four years. And you won’t believe this – she has won the first prize in her age category every single time. According to Professor Delan McGonagle, the chairman of the judging panel, Shania is a ‘young artist of exceptional skill and ability among the many talented artists in the competition.’ He also added that Shania’s work has established her as one of the most talented artists of her generation, whose skill could see her become one of Ireland’s foremost portrait artists of the future.

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