The Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India, is home to one of the most amazing wooden sculptures ever made – Mephistopheles and Margaretta, a double sculpture featuring two distinct characters on opposite sides.

Carved out of a single piece of Sycamore sometime in the 19th century, by an unknown French artist, Mephistopheles and Margaretta is not only the most photographed artwork displayed at Salar Jung Museum, but also one of the most recognizable images on the internet. Photos of this stunning sculptures have been doing the rounds on social media and capturing the imagination of millions around the world, for a very long time. And for good reason, the level of intricacy, and the binary design have remained unmatched in the last two centuries.

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Japanese self-taught artist Rito (@lito_leafart) spends hours painstakingly carving tree leaves to create stunningly detailed scenes that capture viewers’ imagination.

Rito’s leaf cutouts are impressive enough by themselves, but the story of what inspired the artist to take up leaf art in the first place makes them even more so. Apparently, the Japanese artist suffers from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and spending hours focusing on a single artwork was his ways of treating his condition. He has been creating at least one of his leaf cutouts a day, as a form of therapy.

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Mexican artist Amadeus Garuda combines his passion for plasticine modeling and his love of all things geek to create some of the most stunning sculptures we’ve ever seen.

Amadeus, who goes by Dr. Garuda on social media, is a truly multitalented artist. He starts out by drawing a detailed sketch of his chosen character, in the particular pose he plans on recreating. He then start work on the metal wire frame of the sculpture itself, setting it over the sketch multiple times, to make sure it is correctly bent in the right places. Next, he crumples aluminum foil on the frame, and starts applying strips of red modelling clay. Using only his fingers, a scalpel and a cylindrical rod, he molds the clay into stunningly detailed anatomical parts, creased fabric, armor, and more.

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A stonecutting workshop that set out to carry on the legacy of legendary Russian jeweler Peter Carl Fabergé has managed to raise the art of volumetric mosaic stone cutting to a level never reached before in all of human history.

Volumetric mosaic is one of the most complicated and technical hardstone carving techniques. It involves combining volumetric fragments of various colored semiprecious and ornamental stones to assemble impressive sculptural compositions. It has been practiced by Russian craftsmen and artisans for over a century, but Alexei Antonov’s stonecutting workshop in Yekaterinburg has elevated the art form to a whole new level, by incorporating precious metals in the detailed sculptures and using modern technology to make the artworks stunningly detailed.

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Self-taught artist Sergi Cadenas is a master of kinetic wall art, creating not one, not two, but three distinct portraits in a single painting, each revealed when the artwork is viewed from a certain angle.

Sergi Cadenas’ amazing artworks consist of rigid vertical strips that he paints individually, by hand. The ‘trick’ is to paint a different person on each side of each strip, so that when viewed from opposite sides, a different person can be seen. But if you stand right in front of the kinetic painting, the features of the two portraits blend to create a third portrait.

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At only 23 years of age, James Cook is already one of the world’s premier typewriter artists, and looking at his works it’s easy to see why.

The young architecture student got into typewriter art about five years ago, after reading about Paul Smith, another famous typewriter artist who couldn’t use a pencil or paintbrush to do drawings, because of his severe cerebral palsy. Cook was inspired by the story and intrigued about typewriter art, so he decided to give it a try. It was love at first sight, and after buying his first typewriter from an elderly couple looking to sell up their heap of antiques, James started using it to create illustrations and portraits.

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A talented Japanese food artist uses popular spreads like fruit jams, peanut butter and Nutella to create intricate artworks on slices of white bread.

Drawing inspiration mainly from popular anime like Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away or Dragon Ball, Japanese artist KU (@ken.tuchy) creates stunningly intricate and edible illustrations with breakfast classics like jam, peanut butter and cocoa spread. He is somehow able to keep all the different fruit jams and the other spreads from mixing, as well as the bread slices from becoming too soggy to work with, and the end result is always nothing short of breathtaking.

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Looking at the beautiful bouquets of Ukrainian artist Olesya Galushcenko, it’s hard to believe that all the flowers aren’t actually real but made of hard porcelain.

Olesya Galushcenko is a hydraulics engineer who got into porcelain flower making as a personal challenge. Seven years ago, during maternity leave, she decided to take on an artistic project that involved using her hands, and a decorative flower bouquet caught her eye. The artist was self-taught, so she refused to pay for classes and decided to learn the craft herself using free internet tutorials. But they only served to get her started, because she soon realized that polymer clay wasn’t the right material for the degree of realism she wanted, so she decided to experiment herself and soon discovered that cold porcelain met her requirements.

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It’s safe to say that Toronto-based artist Bashir Sultani isn’t the superstitious type, as he has no problem spilling the salt to create some of the most amazing temporary artworks we’ve ever seen.

Afghan-born Sultani originally rose to internet fame about nine years ago, when photos and videos of his early celebrity salt portraits went viral online. They’re still impressive after all these years, but the talented artist has come a long way since, taking his salt art to a whole new level with a life-like food portrait series. Instead of sticking to pure salt on a black canvas, Bashir Sultani now uses colored salt as well to create convincing representation of various foods solely by sprinkling it on a dark plate.

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A trained software engineer, Sachin Sanghe spends most of his free time sculpting sticks of chalk into beautiful artworks, from portraits of celebrities, to depictions of Hindu gods.

As a high-school student, Sachin Sanghe was  always called to the front of the class to write notes on the blackboard, so it’s no surprise that he formed a special connection to the humble chalk. He started carving sticks of chalk with his geometry tools as a hobby, and as time went by, he got better at it. But then he got into an engineering college, and his art had to take a backseat to his academic responsibilities. However, after finishing school and getting a job, Sachin was free to return to his special hobby again. He did so, and became so good at it that the self-taught artist is now being hailed as one of the world’s best chalk sculptors.

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Looking at the tattoos of Mexican artist Yatzil Elizalde, your first reflex is to squint, thinking there is something wrong with your eyes, but it’s just the artist’s unique ‘blurry effect’ style playing tricks on you.

Coming up with a unique tattooing style usually requires a lot of experience and confidence, so it was really surprising for us to learn that the creator of these stunning double vision tattoos was only 25-years-old. Even more surprising was the fact that she had started out as a visual artist, before taking up tattooing six years ago and opening her own studio in Hermosillo, Mexico’s Sonora state.

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Johannes Stötter is a world-renowned body-painter whose artworks are so incredibly realistic most people would never guess they are actually made up of people contorted in just the right positions and photographed from the right angle.

We originally featured the magical body-paintings of Johannes Stötter back in 2014, when he made international news headlines with a mind-blowing project where he turned two of his models into almost perfect Ara macaws. sitting on a branch. He has been keeping busy since then, coming up with all sorts of stunning compositions, from a near-perfect frog made up of several painted human models, to a single person posing as perfectly-detailed butterfly sitting on a sunflower. But, as always, even knowing the secret of Stötter’s art, you still have to squint to make out the people hidden in the artworks.

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Liz Y Ahmet is a self-taught artist who uses a seemingly messy technique to create incredibly detailed and expressive female portraits.

A ‘scribble’ is usually defined as “a piece of writing or a drawing that is done quickly or carelessly”, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Liz Y Ahmet’s work. While her style certainly looks very similar to scribbling, it’s not done quickly and it certainly isn’t careless. The talented artist’s technique is intentionally messy so as to “portray the chaos of emotions that are hidden beneath” her characters’ mask-like visage.

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A young art teacher from China’s Shanxi Province was recently praised online for spending three months working on a detailed chalk rendition of a traditional masterpiece.

When Zhao Wenrui, an art teacher in Fanzhi County, decided to draw a chalk version of Along the River during the Qingming Festival he just wanted to do something interesting for his students, to surprise them when they cam e back from the coronavirus quarantine. He certainly didn’t set out to use eight chalkboards side by side, five buckets of chalk and work on it for no less than three months, but then he found himself unable to ignore any of the details depicted in the treasured panoramic artwork.

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Akie Nakata describes herself as a “stone artist”, but there is more to her craft than simply painting river stones into familiar animal shapes. Every one of her pieces goes through a complex process that begins with choosing the right stone and continues with bringing out the life in it.

The Japanese artist, who goes by Akie on social media, has a very special way of looking at looking at stones. While most of us choose to ignore them, she considers them similar to living organisms, in that there is a rich history behind them and they all have a story to tell. She is just someone enabling that story to come out with her paintbrush. She believes that every stone she chooses in turn chooses her, giving her the ok to paint what she sees on it. Akie feels that her art is a collaborative effort of hers and the stones’, and she always shows her respect by never altering or processing a stone to better suit her design.

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