Niall Shukla is a talented self-taught artist who specializes in cracking detailed portraits into laminated glass canvases by meticulously striking them with a hammer.

Hitting panels of glass with a hammer to create something beautiful sounds counterintuitive, but that’s exactly what makes Niall Shukla’s cracked glass art so fascinating. Using a variety of metal hammers and chisels, the London-based artist chips away at laminated glass panes, creating cracks that ultimately form clear and detailed pictures. It’s an art form that requires mountains of patience and nerves of steel, as one strike too powerful or in the wrong place can result in massive cracks that ruin the artwork, forcing the artist to start from scratch.

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Li Jiayue is a talented young artist from China’s Sichuan province who specializes in extremely detailed three-dimensional optical illusions.

Growing up in Beichuan Qiang Autonomous County, Lia Jiayue has always been passionate about art, and despite majoring in electrical automation, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him that he opted for an artistic career. He focused most of his time on developing unique and eye-catching optical illusions, where he camouflaged various objects like lamp posts, tree trunks, and even large buildings in the background using his expert painting skills. Li made a name for himself on Chinese video-sharing platform Douyin (TikTok), but he has also been featured on mainstream television over the last few years.

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English tattoo artist Daniel Gulliver has become known for his signature debossed tattoos, which look like they have been carved into the wearer’s skin.

Daniel Gulliver, also known as Gully, hails from London in the UK. He specializes in a variety of tattoo styles, from miniature ultra-realistic portraits to impressive optical illusions, like floating objects and characters with shadows placed perfectly to emphasize the floating illusion. However, Gulliver is best known for his debossed tattoos, which appear carved into the skin. They can be unnerving to look at, but there is no denying the talent and painstaking work that went into making them.

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Jorit Agoch is a famous Italian graffiti artist known for his clean style and large-scale, ultra-realistic portrait murals painted on the side of buildings all over the world.

Over the last 16 years, we’ve featured many impressive graffiti artworks, like the mind-boggling optical illusions of Portuguese street artist Odeith, the ingenious portraits of Fabio Gomes Trindade, and the three-dimensional masterpieces of Carlos Alberto GH, just to name a few. However, in terms of realism, few can compare it to the work of Italian street artist Jorit Agoch. Hailing from Quarto, a commune in the Naples metropolitan area, Jorit quickly made a name for himself in the urban art world thanks to his impressively clean style and a degree of realism that is very hard to achieve using spray paint. Today, his awe-inspiring portrait murals can be admired in dozens of cities around the world, from Italy to Russia, the USA, and South America.

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A Japanese artisan spent over 500 hours making a hyper-realistic wool felt model of a Miniature Pinscher.

Terumi Ota’s latest creation, a wool felt Miniature Pinscher, received over 32,000 likes on X (Twitter), and for good reason. At first glance, it looks like a real dog, which isn’t really the case with wool-felt sculptures, especially ones of short-hair breeds like the Pinscher. Apparently, due to the complexity of the project< Ota had to work on it intermittently over the last seven years, while she completed other commissioned works. She estimates that she put in over 500 hours of work, which sounds insane but is justified by the painstaking process of getting the dog’s short hair just right.

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A Belarussian self-taught artist single-handedly built a functional ice boat that can hold at least one person and can be sailed.

Minsk-based Ivan Karpitsky’s passion for ice and snow sculpting is well-known in his home country. His name first appeared in Belarussian newspapers in 2020, when photos of his ice violin first went viral on social media. He has since kept busy every winter, coming up with ever more impressive projects, but this year he really outdid himself with a beautiful and functional boat made entirely of ice. Photos and videos posted on his Instagram page show the Belarusian man painstakingly carving blocks of ice and chiseling at them to create his impressive masterpiece.

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Cosimo Caiffa is a talented Italian graffiti artist who uses spray cans to create some of the most fascinating street art illusions you’ve ever seen!

44-year-old Caiffa, who also goes by ‘Cheone’, paints most of his impressive artworks in his hometown of Nerviano, near Milan. Most of his street art projects not only integrate perfectly with their surroundings, but they also have this uncanny depth to them that often fools passers-by. Having grown up around art and artists in Gallipoli, Leece, Cosimo started painting on canvas at a very young age, but as soon as he discovered graffiti, he knew that was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. He taught himself the 3D street art technique, and he has been using it for years to great effect to turn bland, boring urban spaces into outdoor works of art.

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American tattoo artist Amanda Graves has become famous for her glittering tattoos, which somehow appear to be shimmering on the skin.

Maryland-based Amanda Graves never claimed to be the inventor of the glitter tattoo technique, but when it comes down to it, she is universally considered the best glitter tattoo artist in the world. Her tattoos are so good that people often ask if she actually uses glitter ink to do them (spoiler – she doesn’t), or if her artworks interfere with X-rays. In reality, the glitter is an optical illusion expertly created by Graves using the painstaking pointillism technique. She creates each speck of glitter by overlapping colors with small gauge needles, but the end result is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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Maisie Matilda, a 24-year-old artist from the UK, is being credited for shining a bright spotlight on the fascinating but dying art of book fore-edge painting.

Matilda had been painting for a long time, but she only started experimenting with fore-edge painting during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when she found herself with lots of time on her hands. The self-taught artist went viral at the end of 2021, after posting videos of her work on the fore-edge of a J.R.R. Tolkien book on social media. Her TikTok videos got millions of views, and the young artist found herself giving interviews to some of the world’s largest news outlets. She has been riding this wave ever since, and she currently has over half a million loyal fans on Instagram alone.

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Yeono is a super-talented artist who specializes in micro-realism, creating small but impressively realistic pieces that look ready to jump off of the skin.

28-year-old Yeono is recognized as one of the most talented tattoo artists in Los Angeles. Born and raised in South Korea, Yeono discovered her passion for tattoos only a decade or so ago when her mother decided to get a tattoo and asked her help with finding a good tattoo artist. She soon discovered the world of Japanese tattoos and was blown away by the intricate artworks masters of the craft could produce. She started looking into the possibility of working in the field after graduating high school and began tattooing professionally in 2014. She has since become a master in her own right, producing some truly awe-inspiring masterpieces.

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Park Yong Jae is an incredibly talented artist from South-Korean who specializes in molding and sculpting hyperrealistic figurines of iconic Hollywood actors and K-pop stars.

Not much is known about Park Yong Jae’s work, but he does have hundreds of thousands of followers across several social networks, and for good reason, his hyperrealistic figurines are simply out of this world! The young artist starts by sculpting the heads of his creations, using special tools to recreate every detail, down to individual hair strands. He then attaches them to bodies with movable joints and even uses miniature clothing to really nail their iconic look. The end result is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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Serge Feeleenger is a self-taught Belarussian artist who gained notoriety in the art world for allegedly inventing the ‘ten brushes’ painting technique, where he attaches a brush to each of his fingers and uses them simultaneously.

Guiding a single paintbrush on a canvas to produce a somewhat decent work of art is virtually impossible for most people, but can you imagine painting with ten brushes at the same time? Sounds pretty messy, but there is one man who has been perfecting this unique technique for over a decade. Serge Feeleenger apparently got the idea for painting with multiple paintbrushes at the same time after becoming annoyed with having to regularly change brushes during the artistic process. First, he found a way to attach three brushes to the fingers on his right hand, and after getting used to them, he added two more brushes to his left hand. Before long, he had a brush attached to every finger on both his hands.

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Steph Morris is an insanely talented UK artist who specializes in hyper-realistic drawings of sneakers. Her work is so detailed that even closeups of the drawings are hard to distinguish from the real thing.

When it comes to sneaker drawings, Manchester-born Steph Morris is renowned for her unrivaled realism. She has always had a thing for sneakers, so pairing up this passion with her artistic talent just made sense. She didn’t originally plan to make a living out of drawing sneakers; At first, she was more interested in wearing them, as she pursued a career in sports, but a number of injuries forced her to reevaluate her options and come up with a plan B. She took up the pencil, started drawing the things she loved most, and never looked back.

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Ben Miller is the world’s only fly cast painter. Instead of a regular paintbrush, he dips his special flies in paint, attaches them to a fly rod and flings them against a canvas from dozens of feet away.

Fly fishing and painting don’t really seem like a match made in heaven, but then again, you probably haven’t seen Washington-based artist Ben Miller at work either. He is regarded as the world’s first and only fly cast painter, meaning he uses a fly rod and the art of fly casting to create thought-provoking artworks designed to raise awareness about the importance of preserving the world’s rivers. Growing up in central Washington state, Ben was introduced to the beautiful rivers of the region early on in his life, learning to fish from his father. As a young adult, he got the idea to combine his love for fly fishing with his passion for art in a unique art form that has come to be known as fly cast painting.

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Kuronushi is a young Japanese artist who specializes in shadow art. He puts together hundreds of pieces of cardboard that, when viewed from different angles, project detailed shadows.

You’ve probably seen shadow art – expertly arranged objects that project certain shadows – before, but Kuronushi’s creations are on another level. He glues together hundreds of pieces of cardboard to create themed dioramas that project a shadow artwork when light is cast on them from a certain angle, but there is actually more to these rudimentary-looking cardboard installations. When Kuronushi turns his little dioramas, the shadows they cast change into related portraits. For example, for a scene inspired by the Wizarding World of Harry Potter featuring a broom-riding Hogwarts student and a half-moon, the installation also casts a detailed portrait of Harry Potter himself when seen from a certain angle.

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