Saimir Stari, one of the world’s most famous mosaic artists, is working on yet another mind-blowing masterpiece, this time using approximately one million coffee beans.

The Albanian artist known for creating large-scale art pieces made with the most unusual art mediums (from cork screws and toothpicks to paintbrushes) has recently started work on another massive mosaic, this time mad of coffee beans. Entitled “One World, One Family, One Coffee”, the original mosaic features five characters, each representing a different continent. As you might have guessed, the objective of Strati’s work is to inspire of sense of unit across the world. The patient artist is painstakingly working on his one million coffee beans mosaic in Tirana, Albania, and plans on completing the project on December 12. When finished, his unique artwork will measure 25 square meters and weigh 140 kilograms. As with his other impressive mosaic, Saimir Strati will most likely set a new Guinness record with his coffee bean project.

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We’ve all heard of and probably even known people who snore, smile, talk and even walk in their sleep. But creating art while sleeping? Now, that’s something!

This is exactly the curious case of Lee Hadwin, a 37 year old artist from London, who has been drawing in his sleep since the age of four. When he first started out, he would walk around in his sleep, scribbling on the walls of his house. He once carved on an old bureau, a family heirloom. His mother wasn’t too pleased with this. But soon, Hadwin’s scribblings turned into serious forms of art. As his artwork began to get more beautiful and intricate, he started to gain attention. His “sleep-art” has become so popular now that each piece fetches him a handsome six-figure price. He has produced around 200 pieces of art so far. He now goes to bed every night prepared, with his sketch books and art materials scattered around his flat.

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For those of you who love Christmas but can’t stand falling needles and cheap plastic, Japanese jeweler Ginza Tanaka has created the ultimate Christmas tree –  made of pure gold and worth a whopping $2 million.

After making a 24-karat gold horse for Japan’s newborn prince, and creating another tree worth $850,000, Ginza Tanaka decided to step it up even more and came up with a solid gold Christmas tree for this holiday season. Measuring 2.4 meters high and weighing around 12 kilograms, the luxurious tree is decorated with golden plates and around 60 heart-shaped ornaments, and covered with ribbon. It’s the most expensive thing Ginza Tanaka has ever made, but while I do appreciate the craftsmanship and the effort that went into it, I’m not sure gold is right for such an important symbol. After all, what kind of presents are you supposed to put under such a tree, anyway?

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Pointillism is  the technique used to create an image by repeatedly applying small dots of pure color to a blank canvas. When post-impressionist painter George Seurat first invented this technique, little did he know that a fine arts student would one day use it to create the image of a Beagle, with the help of Sprinkles.

After creating a chair with 22 different shades of paint for his fine arts university project, Joel Brochu was fascinated by the use of everyday objects in art. He first experimented with M&Ms to create images, but their size was a major hurdle. Brochu found that he had to stand several feet away from the completed image to actually view it as a whole. He then happened to notice sprinkles.

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Erin Smith is a young Australian artist who deconstructs entire passages of text and uses the thousands of individual letters to create beautiful detailed artworks.

The 29-year-old from Queensland moved to Melbourne a few years back, to study graphic design, and has recently moved back to her home state. It turned out this wasn’t the right career for her, because “I find it difficult to sit in a chair inside for any period of time…and I’m hopeless at deadlines so I wasn’t very good.” But it was during her studies that her fascination with typography began. “A few years ago at university we were learning about typography, how different weights of a font can help create emphasis etc. About a year later, I was looking at the intricacy of the engracing of a smith and wesson pistol (on the computer, not my own) [and] I thought about this image in relation to typography then started using the computer to creat the image. I did a series of these for a project”

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Pamela Campagna and husband Thomas Scheiderbauer create intricate thread and nail portraits based on old family photographs.

It’s amazing how someone can recreate organic shapes so well from thousands of angles created with nails and thread. Designers Pamela Campagna and Thomas Scheiderbauer take up to a month to work on each of their complicated artworks, but the outcome is certainly worth the time they put in. After analyzing an old photo they begin hammering nails into the canvas until they come up with a pixelated outline of the artwork, after which they start connecting the dots with thread. That’s easier said than done, and looking at how clean yet detailed their portraits turn out, they must have a great deal of patience.

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In 1989 Chinese artist Zhang Baohua invented a new style of painting which requires the artist to use his finger and palm prints to create unique works of art.

It’s hard to believe such masterpieces can be created without any tools, but Zhang Baohuang manages to do it by using just his fingers and palm prints. His unique painting style is characterized by a concise, lively style and a sense of reality, and is considered a combination of traditional Chinese painting and the structural features of Western painting. Most of his works depict animals, especially dogs. Zhang’s works have been featured in art galleries all around the world, and he is known as “China’s world famous palm painting artist”.

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Roman Beybutyan, a young car enthusiast from the Grodno region of Belarus has built an impressive bison sculpture exclusively out of car parts.

Using shock absorbers, springs, steering rods, clutches, chains and various parts from soviet era cars like UAZ, Moskvich and Lada, Roman and his father managed to create a life-size metal bison, in three months. Roman and his father got all the parts they needed from their neighbors’ garages and from the local scrapyard, and welded them together using a photo for reference. Although the young boy, whose family arrived to Belarus from Armenia, has never seen a real bison, he did a fine job recreating one from metal parts.

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We’ve all seen paper dresses before, but Susan Stockwell’s Victorian gowns made from maps and various bills are in a class of their own. A sculptural study on colonialism and the British empire, her series of life-size paper dresses are composed of ordinance survey maps and English bills glued together. By sing military maps to create women’s dresses, Stockwell addresses issues like English colonization and occupation of Scotland over 300 years, and mail domination in Western history. Based on styles of dresses worn by English women explorers during the Victorian period, the artist honors their role in history.

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New York-based artist Angelo Musco is taking the photography world by storm with his incredible mosaics made up of thousands of naked bodies.

Touching themes like birth, procreation and gestation, Angelo Musco creates complex structures of the natural world from an ant colony and beehive to a school of fish, using thousands of human bodies. “A swarm of fish captures a profusion of life, the safety of a symbolic nest, and a connection of one being to another. ‘It’s the strength derived from this collective force,” the artist says on his website. “The nests, as well, relate to the safe geography of birth and early life.” But Angelo Musco also draws inspiration for his unique mosaics from his traumatic early life experience.

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Artist Ted Harrison scattered over 5,000 poppies on the floor of St. Paul’s cathedral, in London, creating a giant artwork that highlight the involvement of children in armed conflict around the world.

Seen from ground level, Ted Harrison’s art installation looks like a bunch of randomly scattered poppies, but looked at from the Whispering Gallery, under the dome of St. Paul’s cathedral, the flowers form an image of three child soldiers, one from World War 2 and two from more modern conflicts. The installation is part of the St Paul’s Cathedral Arts Project, an ongoing programme which seeks to explore the encounter between art and faith, and was created to raise awareness to the issue of children being used as soldiers.

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Peng Jiangya lost all of her fingers when she was only a child, after she fell into a flaming fire stove while her parents were away, but that didn’t stop her from finishing school, establishing a family and even creating beautiful art.

Growing up in a small village at the foot of the Fanjing Mountains on China’s Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, Peng didn’t have the easiest childhood, but things got even worse after she burnt her hands severely after falling in a flaming fire stove. Her parents were too poor to afford reconstructive surgery, so the young girl had to learn to do everything without any fingers. At first she was unable to use chopsticks, and her parents had to teach her for a long time, but thanks to her strong will and a desire to do everything on her own and not rely on others, she managed to overcome those difficult times and is now capable of taking care of her own family.

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Sagaki Keita is an amazingly talented Japanese artist who specializes in recreating classic masterpieces from thousands upon thousands of childish doodles.

If you were to look at Sagaki Keita’s work from really up-close you’d only see familiar doodles like we all used to do back in school, during boring classes. But as you slowly back away, you realize that with every step the doodles seem to blend together until they form an incredibly detailed version of a classic work of art, like the Mona Lisa or an old Roman statue. His art really blows you away, and just thinking about the amount of time and effort that must go into each of his pieces, you can’t help but feel in awe.

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Using photos for loose reference, Brooklin-based artist Alyssa Monks creates incredibly realistic paintings that make viewers scratch their eyes in awe.

Although many set  photo realism as their ultimate goal, artists that can  make people ask themselves “Is this a photo I’m looking at?” when they look at their masterpieces, are really rare. Alyssa Monks is one of those few talented masters that can recreate a photo from scratch using a paintbrush, as well as add their own personal touch and making an artwork really their own. Looking at her amazing works, it’s hard to believe they’re actually painted, and viewers are often only convinced when thy get close enough to see the brush strokes. The paintings are so realistic you can make out every little detail, down to the tiny imperfections of a subject’s skin.

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Oleg Shuplyak is a talented Ukrainian oil painter who uses hidden images to turn his artworks into mind-blowing optical illusions.

Born on September 23, 1967, in the Ternopol region of the Ukraine, Oleg Shuplyak studied architecture at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute, but his passion was always painting. Although he creates all kinds of beautiful paintings, it was his talent of transforming his works of art into optical illusions that really caught my eye. Objects and characters in his paintings are aligned perfectly in such a way they create outstanding illusions that are easily spotted. I find his art fascinating, and having seen some pretty awesome optical illusions in the past, I have to say his works are some of the best I’ve ever come across.

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