Hong Kong-based artist Alfred Chen takes a single thread of yarn over 5,000 meters long and weaves it around a frame made up of around 300 metal nails to create stunningly realistic celebrity portraits.

Chen starts the creative process by selecting a digital image he wants to recreate. He then changes the color version to grayscale, adjusting the brightness and contrast to better expose the shadows and highlights he will have to recreate with thread. Finally, he relies on an algorithm that tells him exactly how to weave a single thread around the 300 metal nails in order to recreate the picture in real life. Then the real work begins.

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Yan Junhai, a talented street artist from the Chinese city of Changsha, in Hunan Province, has been getting a lot of attention online thanks to his ability to create detailed busts of passers-by in a mater of minutes.

Junhai recently rose to internet fame after a video of him working his magic on the streets of Changsha went viral on Chinese social media. Posted by CGTN, the short video shows him moulding pieces of clay into shockingly detailed busts of random people on the street. Yan Junhai only uses his bare hands and a fine clay sculpting knife, in  what seems like dim light, but the results of his work are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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Looking at the expertly-drawn charcoal and graphite portraits of Dylan Eakin, you’d think he has a lifetime of experience and many years of art school under his belt, but the truth is he’s a self-taught artist and he’s only been at it for three years.

Staring at most of Eakin’s black-and-white portraits, I often found myself looking for any clues that I was looking at a drawing and not a high-definition photograph. That’s what hyperrealism is all about, I know, but the talented artist really takes it to the extreme, nailing even the finest of details, like loose strands of hair on his subjects’ faces, droplets of sweat or the smallest wrinkles. To the untrained eye, his works seem perfect, but he is the first to point out that there are some things he simply can’t replicate.

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Portuguese street artist Vile has a gift that some would consider similar to a superpower – he can make concrete walls look transparent to the naked eye, using only cans of graffiti paint.

Rodrigo Miguel Sepulveda Nunes, aka Vile, started doing graffiti when he was 14 years old. In college he studied Cartoon and Animation Film and Drawing and Illustration, and in 2007 he started working as an independent artist. Vile has several remarkable paintings and portraits under his name, but graffiti always remained his biggest passion, and today he is better known as a street artist. Looking at some of his most impressive works, it’s easy to see why Vile is considered one of the world’s most talented graffiti artists.

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Seen from up close, the creations of Swiss artist Simon Berger look more like vandalism, but take a few steps back and you’ll notice the cracks in the smashed glass panes form clear and complex portraits and images.

Berger admits that as an artist, he had the desire to be taken seriously, to attract attention, and the easiest way to do that was to use a material or a creative technique than no one had used before. The trained carpenter decided that laminated glass was not very popular as an artistic medium, so he started experimenting with it, developing an original technique that involved smashing the glass with hammer and chisel to create detailed and recognizable patterns. Having honed his skills, Simon Berger is now able to wield this wilful destruction to create stunning human portraits that are only visible from afar.

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An Indian artist has come up with an ingenious and hilarious way of showcasing the poor state of roads in the city of Bangalore – he put on a realistic astronaut costume and filmed himself walking trough the craters that made a local road look like the surface of the moon.

Baadal Nanjundaswamy is well known for flagging civic issues like the poor condition of roads and large potholes through his stunning street art, but his latest project was by far his most popular one yet. To raise awareness about the pothole-filled Tunganagar Main Road in North Bangalore, the Indian artist dressed as an astronaut and had someone film him as he “moonwalked” through the large craters, while cars and rickshaws drove by. He then posted the hilarious video on social media, where it quickly went viral.

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Nadia Matievskaia, a self-taught artist from Belarus, has been making news headlines for her unusual “brush”. The young artist uses her breasts to paint, but you couldn’t tell by the details displayed in her artworks.

Nadia never trained to become a painter, in fact she dreamed of having a career in the music industry, but a year and a half ago she started taking acting lessons and discovered a hidden talent. The young artist says that the courses taught her not to be so constrained and explore her innermost feelings, but they also helped her experiment with her body and discover an unexpected way to make money. An assignment that one of her teachers gave her required her to create a painting using her breasts and try to sell it. She did exactly that, and she’s been doing it ever since.

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When it comes to recreating the characters of Japanese horror manga artist Junji Ito in real life, there’s no one better for the job than dedicated fan Mamakiteru.

Mamakiteru’s Twitter bio reads “I want to live in the world of Junji Ito”, and since living in the artist’s manga is impossible, she decided to do the next best thing – bring Ito’s characters into the real world, using face paint and a bit of digital editing. Most of her work involves expertly applying makeup to turn herself into almost perfect renditions of Junji Ito manga characters, with digital editing only being used to recreate surreal images which could not otherwise exist in our world. She’s been at it for four years now, and has amassed quite a following on social media.

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Anastasiya and Sergey Lutsenko, a couple of talented artists from the Russian City of Krasnoyarsk, are famous among doll collectors all around the globe as two of the world’s most meticulous doll makers. They can spend several months on a single piece, but it is this attention to details that makes the final product so impressive.

To say that the Lutsenkos’ dolls look like tiny human beings is not that much of an exaggeration. With their shiny, little eyes, perfectly proportionate faces and carefully painted details like freckles and moles,  these dolls that are so realistic they often look like miniature people. To add to the realism, no two dolls are the same. They are all hand-made and hand-painted, plus they are all highly customizable, with the owners being able to change both their clothes and accessories, as well as the natural wigs.

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Portuguese street artist Odeith is widely considered the pioneer of anamorphic graffiti, and looking at his latest works, many would say he is still ahead of the curve.

Seen from all but the perfect angle, Odeith’s anamorphic masterpieces look strange and distorted, but when properly aligned with the artwork viewers are treated to larger-than-life creations that seem ready to leap off of their concrete canvas. Take the artist’s latest project, a realistic-looking wrecked bus spray-painted on a giant concrete block. Unless you saw the “before” photo, you could swear that was a real bus.

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Once a Russian boxing champion, Renat Agzamov is now known as a celebrity cake maker specializing in elaborate, edible masterpieces that sell for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A self-described workaholic, Renat Agzamov baked his first cake when he was only seven-years old and claims to have since created over 2,700 cakes, constantly trying to improve his skills and surpass clients’ expectations. Despite dedicating much of his youth to sports and becoming a boxing champion in his native Russia, the talented food artist says that cooking in general and cake making in particular have always been his greatest passions. Today, he is one of the world’s most sought-after cake artisans, creating incredibly complex wedding cakes for high-profile clients all around the world.

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You’ve probably seen wood artists carve impressive sculptures out of giant logs, be it with a chainsaw or hammer and chisel, but you probably haven’t seen anything quite like what Spanish artist Gerard Mas is capable of.

By tirelessly chiselling away at logs cut from mature tree trunks then smoothing out his artworks with fine sandpaper, Gerard Mas is able to produce these almost perfect animal sculptures that literally look like photos of living creatures. And as if his works weren’t impressive enough, the dark tones used to expertly recreate the fur of a doberman or the black snout of a German shepherd are achieved only by charring the wood with an open flame. The results are simply breathtaking.

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In an effort to promote sustainable agriculture, Irish as agency Rothco teamed up with German artist Diana Scherer to create The Book That Grew – a 22-page tome created by manipulating the roots of living plants to grow in the shape of letters and diagrams.

We wrote about plant root manipulation for artistic purposes in the past, but this is probably the most ambitious and impressive such project we’ve ever come across. All elements of The Book That Grew, including the ink and binding, were made from grass to show farmer just how powerful a resource it can be, when managed properly. That’s actually the main point of the book, which contains 10 simple yet valuable lessons designed to help maximize sustainability of one of the most valuable agricultural resources, grass. And what better to convey the message to farmers than in the form of an all-organic book grown from that very grass.

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Danny Schleibe, the creator of a unique art form called “tapigami”, spent a whopping 200 hours making an awe-inspiring portrait of actor Bill Murray exclusively out of hundreds of rolled pieces of vinyl tape glued to a wooden panel.

Sacramento-based artist Danny Schleibe has spent the last 14 years of his life refining the contemporary art of tapigami, which looks very similar to quilling, only with vinyl masking tape instead of rolled pits of paper. He recently perfected his technique to a level that allows him to create portraiture, and his first project was an amazing portraits of Bill Murray made out of tiny strips of rolled tape. It’s only when you get up-close and see how he nailed all the subtle details, like the actor’s beard and eyes, that you really start to appreciate all the work that went into the artwork.

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While most people can barely produce intelligible handwriting with the most expensive fountain pens, Turkish artist Yazi Yolcusu creates stunning calligraphy using cutlery like forks and knives.

Yazi Yolcusu, which apparently means “Text Traveler” in Turkish, is living proof that it’s not the tools that make the artist, but their skill. using only metal cutlery – a spoon to hold the ink and forks and knives as writing tools – the talented artist creates some of the most amazing calligraphy you’ll ever see.

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