Latvian coffee shop chain, Double Coffee, celebrated the opening of its second venue in Moscow, Russia, by creating a giant mosaic of its logo, from cups of coffee.

The event took place on June 18, on Old Arbat Street, in Moscow, where a group of designers armed with clipboards started arranging plastic cups of coffee right on the pavement. No one really knew what they planned to do, at first, but as their work started to take shape, everyone recognized the logo of coffee shop chain Double Coffee. To celebrate their second Moscow venue, right on Old Arbat Street, they used 3,300 cups, 220 liters of coffee and 120 liters of milk to recreate the brand logo. To finish the job, the young designers sprinkled ground coffee around the logo to keep the cups together. It’s not clear what happened with all the coffee once the tasty installation was dismantled, but I’m sure the curious crowd that gathered around it was more than happy to help clear the street.

A similar coffee mosaic of the Mona Lisa was created two years ago, in Sydney, Australia, using 3,603 cups of coffee and 564 pints of milk.

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We’ve featured some pretty awesome motorcycle miniatures, in the past, but few were as incredibly detailed as young Vyacheslav Voronovich’s wooden masterpieces.

The Lvov-based artist dreamed of owning a motorcycle ever since he was just a kid, and rode his first one in the seventh grade. At the same time he was always interested in hand-made miniatures, and developed a passion for woodcarving. So even though he couldn’t afford to buy himself a real motorcycle, he discovered he could create his own perfect wooden replicas.

The idea of making his first 1:12 scale wooden motorcycle first came to Vyacheslav a year and a half ago, and it quickly turned into a hobby. He was inspired by some other motorcycle miniatures he had seen online, and wanted to see if he could make his own, from wood. In the beginning, he had some doubts he could actually pull it off, but after figuring out what kind of wood to use for each component, things started going smoothly. He finished his first bike and noticed that every new one he created looked better than the last.

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A collaboration between a talented chocolatier and Scottish band FOUND, this chocolate record can be considered the sweetest release of all time.

Chocolatier Ben Milne met FOUND members, Ziggy and Tommy, a couple of years ago, and they’ve become good friends, so when Ben approached them about doing something together in the shape of a chocolate record, it’s safe to to say they were pretty excited. But while the idea sounded pretty good in theory, it turned out pretty difficult to accomplish. At first, the Fife-based chocolate master went off and bought a 7″ single vinyl and covered it with melted chocolate, but that didn’t turn out very well, and he soon realized he had actually created the opposite of a record. Then he tried making a mold of the record and casting the chocolate vinyl from that, but he still couldn’t get the desired audio quality.

By this time, FOUND’s record company got really excited about this chocolate record, and they got PR companies involved, and Ben was just thinking his idea wasn’t going to work and he was going to let everybody down. As a last resort, he decided to ask the label to provide him with a template they use to press the actual vinyl, only use chocolate instead. That idea proved a winner, and when he played the first one to FOUND, the two members looked pretty impressed.

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Somerville-based artist, Judith G. Klausner, has created a series of classic style cameos, using Oreos as her medium of choice.  Judith started making Oreo cameos back in August 2010, as part of her “From Scratch” series, which features artworks made from toast, cereals, condiments or cheese, and says they’ve all lasted fairly well until now. She keeps the carved Oreos in the fridge, because high temperatures cause the frosting to melt, and humidity causes the cookie to crumble, but in climate-controlled environments, the Oreos’ preservatives make them a “fairly permanent material”.

Judith G. Klausner creates her unique Oreo cameos using fine tools such as toothpicks, straight pins and a balled-tip sculpture stick.

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Klaus Enrique Gerdes, a New York City photographer, has created a series of original portraits made exclusively from vegetables, fruits and flowers.

Seeing these incredible artworks for the first time, I thought they were masterpieces of the famous Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527 – 1593) – an Italian artist known for his imaginative portraits made entirely from fruits, vegetables and flowers. But whereas Arcimboldo painted his portraits, Gerdes first created them from real fruits, vegetables and flowers, and then took photos of them. They actually remind me a little of the fabulous vegetable art of Ju Duoqi, and Carl Warner’s foodscapes.

Gerdes told the PDN Gallery that the idea for his organic portraits first came to him while working with leaves.  “While I was photographing a human eye that was peeking out amongst hundreds of leaves, it occurred to me that I could actually utilize leaves to construct portraits or masks.” It just evolved from there and he started using fruits, vegetables and flowers.

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Vomit painter Millie Brown creates what some people call art by drinking colored milk and regurgitating it onto a white canvas or even her own dress.

Is it just me, or is art getting weirder and weirder. I mean I’ve seen “artists” paint with their breasts, create props from meat and eve dude that paints with his penis. Someone once told me anything is art if at least one person thinks so, but this is getting ridiculous. Take Millie Brown, also known as the Vomit Painter. She has mastered the art of regurgitation and uses her talents to create actual art. Her work requires her to drink colored milk and simply vomit on a white canvas, thus creating abstract “paintings” worth thousands of dollars.

Why anyone would pay to own someone else’s colored puke is beyond my understanding. I mean, if we were talking about Justin Bieber’s vomit, I could understand, I’m pretty sure there are some girls out there who would pay anything just to sniff his dirty underwear, but this isn’t the case. One of Brown’s artworks, Nexus Vomitus, created to an acoustic accompaniment of opera singers Patricia Hammond and Zita Syme, sold for $2,400, which is just mind-boggling. Read More »

Devon-based artist Rupert McKelvie has used thousands of discarded puzzle pieces to create a stylish table complete with a lamp.

If you’re wondering what inspired the 27-year-old artist to create pieces of furniture from a weird medium like broken puzzles, it was the frustration of spending hours of patient labor assembling a puzzle, only to see them wasted because of a missing piece. Apparently, charity shops get a lot of puzzles handed in these days, only most of them are missing at least one piece, so he decided to use these incomplete artworks to create something new and complete.

McKelvie has put in hundreds of hours painstakingly assembling around 4,800 puzzle pieces into what looks like a functional and stable table, from popular jigsaw puzzles featuring the Taj Mahal, the Arc de Triomphe and Winnie the Pooh. It must have been a pretty tedious process, but it beats searching everywhere for that one missing puzzle, only to find it under the couch, years later.

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James Charles is not the first artist to use currency as inspiration for his original art, but his works are the geekiest I’ve seen in a while.

While some items of the “American Iconomics“series might have ou think that Charles simply manipulated the faces on genuine dollar bills, it’s just an illusion. The artist kept the original outline of the bills, but replaced the faces of former American presidents with those of famous pop icons like Jimi Hendrix, Master Yoda, Mr. Spock, Sarah Palin, and many others. In sone cases he simply drew over the faces of the presidents to give them a whole new look, but every one of his pop-culture dollars comes with a sarcastic and funny line of text.

The “American Iconomics” collection is currently on display at San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery, where pop-art fans can purchase their favorite artworks for anywhere between $600 and $1,000.

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We’ve seen motherboards used as an art medium before, but Arizona-based artist Joe Dragt took it one step further when he decided to uses the basic computer components as painting canvases.

Joe first got the idea of using motherboards as canvases for his art earlier this year, when his full-time job required him to take more than 30 old computers to be recycled. Looking at that huge stack of computers, the idea just hit him. He thought thought the complexity of the circuits could make motherboards really great backgrounds for his paintings, and during these troubled economic times, they were much cheaper than traditional canvases, too.

He asked if he could take one of the old computer home, to give his idea a go, and it just blossomed from there. He recycles 100% of the computers he uses, meticulously unscrewing every component. He uses the motherboards as canvases, the co0l-looking parts for his sculptures, and sends the rest of the plastic and metal bits to recycling facilities. All potentially harmful elements are taken to a special facility, in Phoenix.

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Nashville-based artist, Herb Williams, makes incredible 3D sculptures from hundreds of thousands of colorful Crayola crayons.

37-year-old Herb first started working with Crayola crayons, after he was inspired by a dream. He had worked with various mediums, but his career wasn’t really going anywhere, he had no money and was alienating his friends due to frustration. He even got to the point where he thought “this is not worth it”, burned some of his works, but it was that very night that he has a powerful dream in which someone inspired him to use crayons in his art. He got up the next morning, wrote some ideas in his notebook, and he has been making a living out of it ever since.

Most people would have probably used the crayons as drawing tools, but not Herb. He painstakingly cuts ever crayon to size, using a double guillotine cigar cutter, before sticking them to a shaped mould, with industrial glue. He is the only person in the world who has a personal account with Crayole, because of the high number of crayons he buys from them every year. Each of his spectacular 3D sculptures numbers thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands of crayons, and he always has crates of 3,000 of each crayon color shaped to his workshop.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the work of Italian artist Dario Tironi is evident proof. While most people look at discarded objects and see only trash, he sees precious materials for his beautiful sculptures.

Old toys, discarded computer components, broken calculators, even plastic bottles, they’re all part of Tironi’s recycled universe. Similar to Robert Bradford, who uses old toys for his sculptures, and Leo Sewell,  the young Italian artist manages to glue together various junk items and create detailed sculptures of people and animals, and gives everyone who sees his art a whole new perspective on the concept of recycling.

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Although relatively new, book carving has become on of the most popular art forms of our time, with masterpieces of acclaimed artist like Brian Dettmer or Long Bin-Chen exhibited in galleries around the world. Kylie Stillman cuts new life into old, outdated books, by sculpting them as slabs of stone and turning them and giving them a second chance as veritable works of art.

Using a scalpel, Stillman cuts right into the stack of books, creating beautiful inverted reliefs of trees and the birds that once inhabited them. Her works remind us where the paper for the books came from, by turning the thousands of pages into versions of their original tree form.

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Ed Jarrett first built the world’s tallest sand castle in 2003, then broke his own record in 2007, and now his back with his third consecutive record, a 37-foot, 10-inch sand marvel.

As you can probably imagine by looking at the photos below, Ed used more than just a sand bucket and shovel to complete his masterpiece, In fact, he needed the help of 1,500 volunteers, who worked a total of 2,500 hours turning 1.6 million pounds of sand into a record-breaking castle.

Work on the castle began on April 1st, and the completed structure was ready for official measurement seven weeks later, on May 20. According to Laura Ward, public relations official for Jarrett’s Castle, the work was initially supposed to be even taller, at 38 feet and 75 inches, but after a blue bird decided to scrape the top of the castle and meteorologists announced hostile weather conditions, the team hurried to get the sand castle certified before it got even shorter. Still, at 37 feet, 10 inches, Jarrett’s Castle is still easily the tallest sand castle in the world.

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I know what you’re thinking, so do those fashion companies making real fur coats, but Jess Eaton only uses the remains of animals that died of natural causes, have been hit by cars, or that have been killed for food.

Jess’ Roadkil Couture collection features weird items and accessories, like a necklace made from with the skulls of 12 dead pheasants, a bolero jacked made from the furs of 50 white rats eaten by her friend’s reptile, or a hat made from four magpie wings, but the designer claims she’s not out to shock the world. Sure, some of her pieces look like something only Lady Gaga would dare wear, but Jess Eaton says her creations are only meant to be beautiful, not outrageous.

While other women would probably flinch at the sight of a dead animal, Jess is more than happy to pick it up, skin it herself and use its various body parts in her unique fashion item. She recently received a dead horse’s head, which she carved and used in various pieces, proving she’d definitely not squeamish when it comes to working with her material of choice. Her seven-year-old son, Norton, however is sick of the smell of flesh-eating bugs in their Brighton house, and can’t wait until Jess finally opens her own studio, away from home. If there is an advantage to working with dead animals, is that the “fabrics” for her works are always free.

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To tell you the truth I often wondered why no one bothered to create a portrait of the Black Eyed Peas using black eyed peas, before. We’ve seen all kinds of weird portraits, like those made of toast, broken vinyl or bottle caps, so a black eyed peas portrait of the Black Eyed Peas seemed almost logical.

English artist Lee Mericks finally rose up to the challenge and created an 85 cm by 60 cm portrait of BEP singer will.i.am using nothing but thousands of black eyed peas. The artwork was commissioned by Alton Towers, to celebrate the Black Eyed Peas’ forthcoming concert at the Staffordshire resort, and took 24 hours, over a four-day period, to complete.

According to Lee Merricks, the black eyed peas portrait of will.i.am contains approximately 5 kilograms of black eyed peace, each of which were painstakingly placed by hand. If you’re curious to know the exact number of peas used, feel free to count them yourself.

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