We’ve featured some impressive body art on Oddity Central, like Luca Luce’s face-painted optical illusions or the colorful chest artworks of Georgina Ryland, but nothing quite like the detailed lip art of Ryan Kelly. The talented makeup artist paints tiny yet intricate portraits of celebrities and popular characters on her lips.

Looking at the kind of detail Ryan Kelly is able to produce on such a tiny and unusual canvas, it’s hard to believe that her lip art started out as a joke. Four years ago, Ryan and her husband were on the couch watching Katy Perry’s Superbowl halftime show, when their attention was caught by one of her dancers, who later went viral as “Left Shark”. He was fumbling through the choreography, but looked cool doing it, and they both found him hilarious. It was the makeup artist’s husband who suggested that she paint a shark on her lips and the fins on her fingers so she could puppet her very own Left Shark performance. She did just that and posted a photo of her facial makeover on social media. The response was overwhelmingly positive and inspired her to delve deeper into lip art.

Read More »

Looking at the artworks bellow, you could swear they the charcoal drawings of a talented artist, but they’re actually not drawings at all, but hair paintings, and they’re hand-made not by an artist, but a skilled hairdresser.

Allen Chen, who works as a hairdresser at the XB Hair Professional salon in Changhua, China, recently became an internet sensation in his home country, after photos and videos of his incredibly detailed hair paintings went viral online. His latest masterpiece, a “hairy” portrayal of Romance of the Three Kingdoms heroes Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fey has been massively shared on Weibo, and videos of the young hairdresser carefully arranging the hair trimming to create the three characters have already been viewed millions of times. And looking at the quality of these artworks, it’s easy to see why everyone is so impressed by Allen’s talent.

Read More »

The intricate aluminum can sculptures of Noah Deledda look like the work of precise automated machines, but the Tampa Bay-based artist makes them all by hand, using only his thumbs to create dents and creases in the soft metal.

Looking at the perfect geometric patterns sculpted into these shiny aluminum cans, you’d be excused for thinking that Noah Deledda is actually a robot. Just look at them, there’s no way anyone could be this precise with their hands, let alone only their thumbs. Which is why the talented artist has had to produce video evidence of the creative process, and prove that he doesn’t just use some kind of press to shape the recycled aluminum cans.

Read More »

A Japanese high-school student recently got his five minutes of fame on Twitter after posting photos of an incredibly detailed action figure he made out of around 300 discarded cicada shells.

Twitter-user @ride_hero came up with the idea of using discarded cicada shells for artistic purposes after accidentally stepping on one at school. Looking at the shattered shell, he thought to himself “what a waste” and challenged himself to come up with a way of reusing all the discarded cicada shells at his high-school. Evening Cicadas, or Higurashi, are very common in Japan during the summertime, and they tend to shed their shells almost everywhere, so it wasn’t hard for @ride_hero to collect hundreds of them in his high-school yard alone. After finishing his AO exams, the high-school senior needed to kill some time over the summer vacation, so he started experimenting with the collected cicada shells.

Read More »

Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.

31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.

Read More »

Two years ago, English artist Carl Lavia set out to create a large-scale sketch of Birmingham, one of the largest cities in the UK, using photos he took himself while walking around the city, as well as aerial footage from books and google maps to help him piece the whole thing together. The result of his work was so impressive that Lavia decided to dedicate years of his life to sketching out all 69 cities in the United Kingdom, in great detail.

44-year-old Carl Lavia started drawing when he was just 5, and has been doing it ever since. After spending most of his childhood drawing imaginary cities, the self-taught sketch-artist fulfilled his dream of sketching the impressive cities of his homeland. With the help of his project partner, Lorna Le Bredonchel, Carl spends weeks walking around the cities he plans on reproducing, to get a feel of the atmosphere that makes them unique, but also stopping to take photos and do sketches of sections he finds particularly interesting. He then uses these bits of information, as well as aerial imagery to create large-scale sketches of each city. The whole process, from research stage to the completed sketch can take several months.

Read More »

David Bayo, a self-taught artist from Strasbourg, France, spends hundreds of hours carefully placing tiny ink dots on a white canvas to create incredibly detailed portraits.

To truly appreciate David Bayo’s skills, you need to lean in and examine his amazing artworks up close. Only when you see the millions of dots expertly placed by the artist over dozens, sometimes hundreds of hours, do you begin to understand the hard work and patience that go into each and every one of his stippled portraits.

Read More »

At just 30-years-old, Karol Rybakowski is already one of the biggest names in the world of tattoos, and looking at some of his works, it’s pretty easy to see why. His portrait tattoos look as if a picture has been slapped on the subject skin, and in many cases they turn out even better than the photos that inspired them.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Karol Rybakowski studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Warsaw, before becoming a tattoo artist, but while that explains his artistic style, I for one still can’t wrap my head around how a 30-year-old can create such stunningly-realistic tattoos. And apparently, I’m not the only one. About four years ago, just when his works started showing up online, people in the business who had never seen his tattoos in person actually thought that they were photoshopped. There was a particularly heated debate surrounding his tattoo of Bradley Cooper as sniper Chris Kyle in “American Sniper” with many people claiming that it looked too good to be true.

Read More »

A Miami based artist creates stunningly detailed paintings that look like real Persian rugs. Jason Seife, who is a muralist and a graphic designer, began developing the intricate pictures in 2015 as a form of self-expression, but also as a nod to his Middle-Eastern roots.

Each dizzyingly elaborate piece is ink and acrylic, and feature the floral motifs and geometrical shapes seen on the large floor coverings. The history of classic rug design inspired the series, with a nod to the weavers’ use of pattern and color to signify the specific tastes of their tribe. Accordingly, Seife weaves his moods and mindsets into his work, choosing colors and patterns that represent his mental and emotional mindset at the time.

Read More »

65-year-old Zhang Kehua, a retired mason from Qianjiang, China, has a very unique skill – he can assemble realistic Chinese vases out of thousands of folded plastic playing cards.

We’ve seen people create all kinds of impressive structures by expertly stacking playing cards, but what Zhang Kehua does is on a whole other level. The Chinese retiree has taught himself several methods of folding plastic playing cards so that they can be assembled into life-size vases that even feature traditional decorative patterns. His creations are so flawless that seen from a far, you could swear that they are made of porcelain.

Read More »