26-year-old Helena Fernandes likes to draw, but she is not particularly good at it. But did that small detail stop her from opening her own tattoo shop and permanently inking people with her mediocre designs? Of course not! If anything, her poor drawing skills actually contributed to her success.

Helen did her first tattoo about a year ago, when she inked her boyfriend for fun. Apparently, their friends found her work appealing, because it was natural and different, and some of them asked her to work her magic on them as well. She bought her own tattooing kit on the internet, and due to the high cost of materials, she started charging for tattoos, investing all the proceeds into better quality supplies. She started working as a professional tattoo artist in March, inking people at a studio she set up at her home.

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Jacqui Kenny has always wanted to travel the world, meet new people and discover different cultures, but she suffers from agoraphobia – an anxiety disorder characterized by fear of public spaces, public transportation, open spaces and/or large crowds – so she rarely gets to leave her house. Luckily, modern technology allows her to live out her dream, sort of.

Jacqui was diagnosed with agoraphobia 8 years ago, but she has been dealing with extreme anxiety and panic attacks for over 20 years now. Last year was a particularly trying time, as a company  that she had co-founded for many years had just closed, and dealing with the stress of it, on top of her mental issues, was tough. She didn’t know what she was going to do with her life, and leaving the house to face the world was not an option. She needed something to keep her busy, and somehow, she discovered Google Street View.

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Some people have problems sitting through a 2-hour movie without falling asleep, but that’s merely a blink of an eye compared to Ambiencé, an upcoming film by Swedish director Anders Weberg, which will last for a whopping 720 hours. That’s 30 days of continuous screening time.

After working in the field of visual arts for over two decades, Anders Weberg plans to end his career in 2020. But he wants to go out with a bang, by creating the longest film in the history of cinema. Called Ambiencé, the epic 720-hour work of art will be screened simultaneously on all continents, for one time only, after which the Swedish director plans to destroy all copies, so that it can never be screened again.

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Danish avante-garde artist Kristian von Hornsleth recently drew criticism for his latest project, which involves turning London homeless people into real-life Pokemon that can be tracked 24/7 via a special app. To make matters worse, every “human Pokemon” can be bought for $32,700.

Von Hornsleth, whose previous artistic endeavours include paying poor African villagers to change their name to Hornsleth in exchange for aid, describes his latest idea as an “ethical boundary-smashing work” that “fuses homelessness, privacy invasion, inequality and reality TV, with present day cultural decadence and interactive conceptual art.”

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Allan Pachino Wallace is a young, talented artist from Nassau, the Bahamas, who recently rose to internet fame with a series of amazing celebrity portraits made only with salt, coffee or baking soda.

Wallace works with all kinds of mediums, from common oil paint and spray paint, to tree leaves and cereal. A quick look at his social media profiles on Facebook or Instagram reveals the versatility and talent of this young artist, but the internet only learned about it after he shared a salt portrait of actor/comedian Kevin Hart on his Facebook page. People loved it and got shared so much that Kevin Hart himself saw it and publicly congratulated Allan on his work.

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A team of Russian artisans from the city of Blagoveshchensk spent three months creating a real-life version of the iconic “Iron Throne” from the popular Game of Thrones TV series. They claim it is the only one in the world made out of actual iron swords, as even the one on the show is made of plastic.

The life-size Iron Throne was created by two blacksmiths, a welder, and a couple of artists, all members of the Association of Artisans of Blagoveshchensk and the Amur Region. In a video showcasing the impressive metal artwork, Vadim Nikolayev, one of the people involved in the project, said that the throne required about a half tonne of metal, which was used to forge 387 swords and a few dozen daggers. Some of the blades were hammered into the right shape to create the seat of power and finally welded together.

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28-year-old Irakli Nadar is considered one of the most talented digital artists of our time. Using only digital painting tools, he is able to create photo-like portraits from scratch. His works are so good that many in the digital art world accuse him of simply applying various filters to digital photographs and passing them off as paintings.

You could say that Irakli Nadar’s amazing skill is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, his breathtaking artworks have brought him worldwide fame and legions of adoring fans on various social networks, but his success and enviable skill have also made him the target of criticism from both rival artists and the average internet trolls. Luckily, he has learned to live with both, and says that tough as it sometimes is, he just ignores the haters and focuses on the positive.

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26-year-old Kel Cruz, an artist from Quezon City, Philippines, is being hailed as a “pixel art wizard”, for his mind-blowing pixelated portraits created with everything from bits of scotch tape and matchsticks, to fingerprints and blood stains.

Cruz, who works as a male nurse, used to create pixelated art the old fashioned way, with a ballpoint pen. But then a rival artist challenged his artistic talent, accusing him that he was using a printer to create his detailed portraits. That inspired him to stop relying so heavily on conventional tools and start exploring unusual mediums. Since then, he has used lipstick, colored tape, rubber stamps, beer and even woven pieces of paper to create some truly awe-inspiring masterpieces.

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Noel Cruz, a Filipino-American artist based in Anaheim, specializes in repainting mass-produced celebrity and character dolls, like those made by Mattel, into hyper-realistic miniature models of the people that inspired them. The results of his meticulous work are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Born and raised in Manila, the Philippines, Noel Cruz has been drawing and painting people’s faces for most of his life. It all started when he was 12 years old, when, while looking through a neighbor’s window, he saw a telecast of the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant on television. Seeing so many beautiful faces all at once inspired him to start drawing portraits on pieces of paper. At age 16, having undergone no specialized training, Cruz was already selling portraits as commissioned work. But he only discovered the fascinating world of repainted dolls several years later, after emigrating to the United States with his family.

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We often hear about the insane amounts of trash we as a species currently generate, but words and figures don’t make a very big impact on most people. Images work much better, so one French artist decided to actually show just how much trash a single human being generates over time. To do that, he stopped throwing away recyclable trash for four years.

Antoine Repessé stopped throwing away recyclable waste like plastic bottles, toilet paper tubes or newspapers back in 2011, storing it in his apartment, instead. That wasn’t a big issue at first, but as time went by, trash started covering the floor of his home, and soon began piling up and covering every available space. After four years of collecting trash, Repessé’s apartment ended up looking like the home of one of those extreme hoarders you see on TLC.

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Some people are just born with an insane amount of talent. Take 31-year-old Nikola Čuljić, a self-taught artist from Serbia. He has been actively drawing for only three years, yet look at the wonders that he’s able to produce with some pencils, markers and pastels.

People had always told Nikola Čuljić that he had a talent for drawing, but he just wasn’t very interested in it. Then, three years ago, he decided to give it a shot, so he started drawing ultra-realistic portraits. That turned out to be very hard, and the young artist realized that he wasn’t very good at it, or, at least not as good as he wanted to be. Čuljić wanted to be the best, and anything less than that just didn’t satisfy him, so he decided to try something different. And that’s how he got into hand-drawn 3D illusions.

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Laetitia KY, a young fashion designer from the Ivory Coast, recently went viral on social media for an original photo series where she sculpts her long hair into a variety of shapes, from human hands, to bunny ears and even the African continent.

KY says that she has always been fascinated by hairdressing, but got the idea for creative hair art a year ago, while admiring the intricate hairstyles of women from various African tribes. She found them amazing and they inspired her to use her own hair as a means of artistic expression. The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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A 22-year-old French makeup artist recently caused quite a lot of dropped jaws on Twitter with a set of photos of a “painting” whose protagonist turned out to be a living, breathing model.

I don’t know if that opening line made any sense to you (probably not), but what 22-year-old Kenza managed to do is best explained in pictures, not words. Inspired by the work of Alexa Meade, an exceptionally talented artist whose mind-boggling masterpieces we featured a few years ago, the aspiring makeup artist painted a human model with broad brushstrokes to create the illusion that she was actually a character in a painting, and not a real live person. I think she pulled it off magnificently, and so do the tens of thousands of people who liked and shared her pics on social media.

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If you’re looking for the perfect place to take an Instagram-worthy photo in Los Angeles, these three completely pink houses in the city’s Pico neighborhood are bound to catch people’s attention.

The question “what would Barbie’s house look like in real life?” has just been answered courtesy of Los Angeles artist Matty Mo, a.k.a @themostfamousartist. He was asked by M-Rad Architecture, a local housing developer, to create some buzz about their new project, a a 45-unit apartment complex to be built on the lot currently occupied by three abandoned houses. Mo and his company, The Mural Agency, specialize in “‘Instagrammable’ experiences as a service for brand partners worldwide,” and in this particular case, they decided to paint the three houses completely pink, before they are demolished.

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Ever take a look at your Facebook friend list and wonder ‘how many of these people are actually my friends?” Well, artist Tanja Hollander did, and after thinking about if for a while, she decided to find out the answer to that question by visiting all of her 626 Facebook friends. She documented the experience in an epic 5-year-long project called “Are You Really My Friend?”

It all started on New Year’s Eve 2010, when, after conversing with some of her online friends, Maine-based artist Tanja Hollander stared wondering what her relationship with all the people in her Facebook list was. She asked herself if friendships formed online were as real as offline ones and if many of her “friends” were actually just acquaintances. “Am I really friends with all these people?” Tanja told herself, and she immediately knew she had to find out.

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