Can beauty be created out of destruction and chaos? Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto believes that it can, and offers his incredible chiseled portraits on the side of buildings, as proof.

23-year-old Farto, aka Vhils, grew up in Seixal, on the outskirts of Lisbon, and became interested in graffiti art during the late 1990s. Apparently, at some point that just wasn’t enough for him and he started looking for other ways to express his creativity through urban art. He came up with subtractive art, which involves creating detailed portraits by breaking away pieces of walls, by using various techniques. His amazing works have been chiseled onto various derelict buildings around Europe and featured in exhibitions alongside pieces by world-renowned street artists the likes of Banksy. The young artist hopes his “faces in the city” portraits will inspire people to see beyond what meets the eye.

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Los Angeles-based Cecelia Webber takes nude photos of the human body and assembles them in the shape of flowers and butterflies, to create some of the most stunning images you’ve ever seen.

Three years ago, Cecelia Webber was a neuroscience graduate from USC, working in the lab all day and indulging in photography in her spare time. And then one day, it happened… “It was an accident, really,” the young artist told Modern Luxury. “I shot a nude figure against a black background and it looked so much like a petal I just went with it.” A Photoshop expert, Webber began layering hundreds of photographs she shot into a single piece to create vibrantly colored flowers made up entirely of the human body. Legs became petals, arms became stamen, and she kept finding new ways of turning instances of the human form into parts of her unique flowers.

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I love splash photography, but this is the first time I’ve seen an artist using this technique to create unique flowers, some with their own liquid flower pots. The patient man behind this amazing art is Jack Long, a talented photographer who spends months planning and experimenting to create these stunning pieces.

Armed with superhuman patience, a high-speed camera and lots of paint, Jack Long set out to create a series of beautiful images called ‘Vessels and Blooms’ in which he tried to create liquid flowers out of colored paint droplets captured in mid-air. The skilled photographer spent several months planning and testing different techniques in order to achieve the best results possible, and judging by his photos, I’d say his work paid off in the end.

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Jeff Ivanhoe has been using aluminum cans to create his incredible artworks since 1981. They’re called ‘alumosaics‘, and as you’ve probably already guessed, they are colorful mosaics made of aluminum.

Aluminum has been around for over 100 years years, and during that time it has proven to be one of the world’s most versatile and easily recyclable materials. We use it to make light construction and car parts, as electronics casings, and even to make unique Christmas trees. But Jeff Ivanhoe has found yet another use for aluminum. He uses recycled soda and beer cans to create his famous alumosaics, a delightful art form he and his wife Barbara invented by pure chance.

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Multimedia artist Phil Hansen uses a technique similar to pointillism to turn ripe bananas into organic canvases, recreating some of history’s most famous artworks.

If this offbeat art doesn’t make you go bananas, I don’t know what will. Hansen’s works are just so detailed it’s hard to believe all he uses to create them is a common pushpin and the banana’s natural oxidation process. The talented artist just punctures the peel repeatedly with the pushpin and the banana, and as the the banana browns, his intricate designs are revealed. Phil Hansen is currently promoting his book, Tattoo a Banana: And Other Ways to Turn Anything and Everything into Art, due next month. In it, he explains how to create art from anything at hand – – like a piece of toast, your own fingerprints, or a stack of marshmallows – using offbeat techniques.

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Steve Wheen realized nobody likes to hit potholes on their way to work, so if authorities weren’t going to fill them, he would. Steve became a guerrilla gardener, traveling around the world and turning ugly potholes into charming miniature gardens.

“Guerrilla Gardening has been around for a long time, in fact one of the earliest examples I know about is when wives of servicemen used to go out planting flowers along the train tracks during WW1 so their husbands would have a pretty journey home,” Steve Wheen says, but he’s taken it to a level where it’s perceived as an art form. The London-based artist started pothole gardening during his university years, partly to make art, partly as a hobby, and mostly to highlight how crappy East London’s streets were. Since then, he’s traveled to other big cities, like Milan, to turn potholes into tiny gardens featuring all kinds of small props.

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He’s not the best English speaker in New York, but his skills with the scissors makes Ming Liang Lu one of the most popular subway artists in the big city. The Chinese master claims the art he practices, cutting people’s portraits out of black paper, is unique in the world.

If you’ve ever used the metro, you’re probably familiar with subway performers like dancers or violin and guitar players, but Ming Liang Lu is a different kind of entertainer. Using a small piece of black paper and scissors, he’s able to create intricate, slightly caricatured portraits of subway riders and passers-by, even without looking at them for reference. That might not sound like a lot, but seeing him manipulate that small sheet of folded paper while holding the scissors almost completely still will blow your mind.

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Greg Dunn is on his way to earning a doctorate in neuroscience, from the University of Pennsylvania, but he’s also passionate about pan-Asian art, so he decided to combine his two main interests into one unique art form.

Dunn paints neurons, the tiny cells that comprise our brain, using the Asian sumi-e style, an ancient technique that aims not just to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. Sumi-e is regarded as the earliest expressionistic art form that captures the unseen. For example, East Asian Ink Brush Painting, as this style is commonly referred to, isn’t used to replicate a person’s appearance perfectly, but rather to express their temperament. In the same way, Greg Dunn doesn’t use photomicrographs as reference to paint a perfect picture of the neurons, but rather as a guide upon which he likes to add his own touch. Painting an exact replica of what he see would “rob the painting of sponteneity”, according to Dunn.

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Chilean artist Carlos Zuniga creates detailed portraits and images by simply striking out names from phone book pages, with black ink. Sounds simple enough, but the results are awe-inspiring.

Carlos Zuniga isn’t the first artist to use phone books as the main medium for his works. Alex Queral has also been using them to carve his amazing celebrity portraits, but Zuniga developed his own artistic technique, which allowed him to differentiate himself from everyone in the art world.

Asked how he came up with this unique way of creating detailed images, the South American artist says it all started with a project he did back in 2006, called The Origin of Species. Inspired by the Ludovico technique used in the 1971 film  the  A Clockwork Orange, he began striking out every line of text from Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species. Throughout the whole process, he couldn’t stop thinking about how to depict his ideas in a figurative way. Figurative representation had always been a great interest to him, but his drawing skills were lousy, and after eight years of taking classes, he felt frustrated.

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Most artists prefer to paint or draw their artistic portraits, but Surrey-based English artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey grow theirs from living grass.

We’ve featured some pretty amazing art here, on Oddity Central, but this probably takes the cake. English duo Ackroyd & Harvey have managed to harness the power of photosynthesis to fix photographic images onto the blades of growing grass. They expose plots of seeding grass to a 400-W projector bulb passing through a negative for prolonged periods of time,  and the varying densities of the negative’s lighter and darker areas produce a full range of midtones by controlling the light levels in each area. The light produces green, or darker tones, while lack of light produces lighter (yellow) tones. Within only a couple of weeks, you can see the green portraits literally emerging from the ground, but wait too long and they will simply fade away, just like old photos.

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Xiaonan Sun has become a YouTube sensation after a video of him drawing the portraits of Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins with both hands, at the same time, went viral. It’s definitely one of the coolest things I have ever seen.

Let’s face it, YouTube is full of videos of talented artists drawing realistic portraits of celebrities, and Xiaonan Sun was just one of them, until he posted a unique video of him drawing a tribute to Shawshank Redemption, one of his favorite movies of all time. The portraits of Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins look pretty impressive, but what really makes them special is the artist did them at the same time, with both hands. Most people can barely draw with their main hand, and here is this guy in his 20s who can do it just as well with both, and at the same time. I know I’m repeating myself here, but this is just insane.

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Colored sand, a great deal of patience and his bare hands are all Joe Mangrum needs to create his incredible sand pantings on the sidewalks of New York.

Joe Mangrum was a painter for many years, but only started creating art with sand in the Fall of 2009. He chose to work with sand because it’s an ephemeral medium that can simply be swept away at the the end of the day, after he’s had a chance to express his talent and amaze passers-by. I never thought sprinkling colored sand through the bottom of your fist could lead to such amazing works of art, but Mangrum’s creations prove patience and talent are the basis of truly incredible things. The gifted street artist spends hours on end on his hands and knees sprinkling his colored sand onto the sidewalk to create ephemeral masterpieces that catch the eye of everyone around him.

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Bristol-based Alexander Korzer Robinson creates incredible works of art by carving discarded encyclopedias and literally exposing their inner beauty. Book carving is one of the fastest growing art forms of the moment, and artists like Alexander Korzer Robinson, Brian Dettmer and Guy Laramee are leading the movement.

Korzer Robinson carefully cuts into the pages of old encyclopedias, exposing a part of its illustrations, while removing others, to create narrative scenes that are truly unique. While the images seem like they’re somehow suspended in a series of layers inside the book sculptures, they are actually left in their original place. It’s the artist’s technique that makes it look like they were placed there by hand. As you can probably guess by looking at the artworks below, book carving is a delicate and time-consuming process, but the end results are absolutely mind-blowing.

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Dr Rev Mayers is an Australian tattoo artist with a passion for creating crimson artworks using nothing but blood. Using a variety of art techniques, he paints incredibly detailed yet somewhat creepy works of art.

Some artist would probably call Dr. Rev crazy for using his own blood on all of his paintings, but so far his disregard for the norm has proven very successful, as his works have been exhibited all around the world. The Sydney-based tattoo artist uses airbrushing, standard paint brushing, scraping, smudging and layering to create his realistic masterpieces that aim to depict growth, human constraint while capturing the viewer’s heart and soul. In time, he has managed to progress naturally from tattooing and doing body art, to his new found passion, blood painting.

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California-based artist Kristen Cumings spends hours on end piecing together detailed works of art out of thousands of colorful jelly beans. Needless to say her pieces look good enough to eat.

Although it must be fun working with jelly beans for a living, making 4 x 6 feet murals out of them is definitely painstaking work. Cumings uses between 8,000 and 12,000 jelly beans for her stunning masterpieces and it takes over 50 hours to complete each one. She starts the artistic process by looking at a close up of the reference photo, and then visualizes where each colored jelly bean has to go. She then paints an acrylic version of the photo on a blank canvas, and once that dries, she begins applying the small beans and tries to match the colors as best she can. The painter/illustrator uses spray adhesive to make sure the jelly beans stick, and usually likes to start her artworks by recreating the main features, like the eyes and nose. Then she just starts applying the other jelly beans from the bottom up until the piece is completed.

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