If you’re the kind of person who shrugs at the mere thought of finding the tiniest scratch on their car, these photos are going to hurt, a lot. So if you’re the sensitive type, proceed at your own risk!

Last September, Danish museum ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum invited visitors to scratch a black Lamborghini Gallardo that had been placed on display, as part of the “No Man Is an Island” exhibition. For three weeks, everyone was allowed to leave a destructive mark on the expensive Italian sports car, and even though people were skeptical about the whole thing in the beginning, once they were convinced that there would be no consequences to their vandalism, they really did a number on the poor thing.

ARoS planned to leave the car at the mercy of total strangers for longer than three weeks, but the damage became so extensive during that time that they realized it would eventually go from black to completely white if they allowed the vandalism to go on any longer. They wanted to preserve the messages that had been scratched into the paint job up to that point, so they posted a guard in front of the exhibit and announced that the artwork was now complete and interaction with the car was no longer allowed.

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LeNovelle Cake, a family-run bakery in Jakarta, Indonesia, specializes in epic wedding cakes. From fairy-tale castles to glazed cathedrals and pagodas up to 7 meters tall and complete with detailed turrets, pillars and balconies, these guys can turn the most outlandish architectural design into a magnificent cake.

The world-famous bakery was founded in 1993 as a neighborhood cake business selling birthday cakes to friends and family, but it slowly grew and in 2004 it started selling wedding cakes under the LeNovelle Cake brand. Their designs have been getting more complex every year, and today they can have up to 24 people working 12 hours a day for over a month to complete just one of their sugar-coated masterpieces.

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In an effort to raise awareness of the growing rate of knife crime throughout the UK, artist Alfie Bradley has spent the last couple of years creating the Knife Angel, a 24-foot-tall sculpture made out of 100,000 knives confiscated by, or surrendered to police stations.

The Iron Throne imagined by George R.R. Martin and showcased on the HBO hit TV show Game of Thrones is supposed to be made out of 1,000 swords surrendered by a king’s enemies. It’s an impressive sight, but it doesn’t even come close to the Knife Angel created at the British Ironworks Centre, in Shropshire, England. For the past two years, artist Alfie Bradley has been literally piecing together the awe-inspiring sculpture out of 100,000 knives confiscated by 41 police stations across the United Kingdom.

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Ever wonder what John Lennon’s “Imagine” looks like? Not the music video, but the song itself. Well, thanks to artist Melissa McCracken, you don’t have to imagine it anymore.

Melissa “suffers” from a condition known as synesthesia, which allows her to experience various things – from sounds to letters and even math formulas – as colors, so whenever she hears music, her mind’s eye sees a symphony of colors and textures. In a desire to capture the way she perceives music and share it with the rest of the world, the Missouri-based artist immortalizes popular songs as vibrant paintings.

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Most people let the strands of hair that fall off when their shower just go down the drain, or they throw it in the trash, but Lucy Gafford, a multimedia artist from Alabama, uses it to create detailed works of art right on her bathroom wall.

The self-proclaimed “Shower Hair Master” discovered that her wet hair made a unique, albeit bizarre art medium, three years ago, while showering. She gathered the hair that came off of her head while washing it, and spread it on the bathroom wall, as she usually did. She planned to throw it away after she was done, but this time she noticed that the strands made up a recognizable shape, so she started playing around with the mass of hair and ended up creating a squirrel.

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Japanese artist Yoneji Inamura spent six years of his life collecting 20,000 beetles of different varieties and using them to create a five-foot sculpture of a popular Buddhist deity.

It’s unclear how and when exactly Inamura started catching and collecting beetles. Some sources claim that it was during his days working for the local railroad, in Itakura, Japan’s Gunma Prefecture, after noticing that the rhinoceros beetle’s horn resembled the fingers of the Buddhist deity, while others say that he was helping local children collect beetles and just became fascinated with them. Living in a rural area of Japan, Inamura was always surrounded by various types of beetles, including rhinoceros beetles, winged jewel beetles, drone beetles, longhorn beetles, just to name a few, and he dedicated most of his free time to catching and adding them to his collection.

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Inspired by Charles and Francis Darwin’s theory on plant intelligence, German artist Diana Scherer managed to successfully coerce the roots of various plants to grow in specific patterns. The results of her work are simply breathtaking.

In his book, The Power of Movements of Plants, Charles Darwin argued that while plants are not capable of moving from the place where they are rooted, their roots don’t just grow passively, but actively observe their surroundings, navigating in search of water and certain chemicals. He also refers to roots as plants’ brain-like organ, suggesting that they are actually a lot more intelligent than most people think.

Based on Darwin’s controversial “root-brain” hypothesis, Amsterdam-based artist Diana Scherer conducted an artistic experiment where she attempted to coerce plant roots to grow in intricate patterns, sometimes becoming interwoven into stunning living carpets.

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Arinze Stanley is a talented young Nigerian artist whose works often leave people scratching their heads and asking themselves if they’re looking at a pencil drawing or a high-definition black and white photograph. Yes, his drawing skills are that good!

Arinze’s interest in art, and drawing in particular, was sparked at a young age, primarily by the fact that he was always surrounded by paper. His family ran a paper company, so he would often kill time by grabbing a piece of paper and trying his hand at drawing. But he only started exploring hyper-realism in 2012, and became a professional artist a year later. He has never taken any professional art classes, and claims that the level of detail he is able to produce is solely the result of years of practice. Looking at his fantastic artworks, it’s safe to say that he has come a long way in very little time.

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Ash Soto was only 12 years old when she was diagnosed with vitiligo, a rare skin condition that causes patches of skin to lose pigmentation. Dealing with the changes to her appearance and the social stigma associated with vitiligo was tough for a teenage girl, but she ultimately managed to accept her condition and make the best of it. Today, Ash even incorporates the unique patterns on her skin to create beautiful body art that inspire and empower people to embrace that we are all different and that’s what makes us special.

It all started with a small spot Ash saw on her neck one day. It looked like a sun spot, so she didn’t pay much attention to it, until another one appeared a few months later. She went to see a doctor about it with her mother, and was diagnosed with vitiligo, a rare and incurable skin condition. Soto was just 12 at the time, and couldn’t yet understand how much this diagnosis would affect her life.

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26-year-old Daniele Barresi is a world champion food sculptor with many other titles under his belt, but some of his most impressive creations are actually carved out of soap bars. Just take a look at what he can do with a simple food sculpting knife.

Barresi discovered his talent for sculpting very early in his life. At age 7, he was already carving fruits and vegetables, and his skills improved as he grew and practiced. After completing his compulsory education, he was admitted at an art high-school in Reggio Calabria, but had to drop out for personal reasons. Five years later, his other passion, cooking, led him to the IPSSAR of Villa San Giovanni “Professional Cook Institute”, where he was able to use his artistic talents to graduate with a score of 88/100. It was here that he discovered his talent for sculpting various foods into detailed works of art.

Daniele went on to win several several medals in international food sculpting competitions, and establish himself as one of the most talented food artists in the world. He didn’t stop there, though. In a quest to diversify his artistic portfolio, he searched for various mediums to unleash his skills on, and that’s how he discovered the simple bar of soap.  And while his various food carvings are certainly impressive, I dare say that his soap masterpieces are even better.

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Abraham Poincheval is no stranger to daring performance art, but his latest project is probably the toughest one yet. The French artist will spend eight straight days sealed in a human shaped hole carved out inside a giant boulder. The purpose of this unusual performance – “to find out what the world is”.

On February 22, 2017, 45-year-old Poincheval was sealed in this carved out stone sarcophagus at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo gallery, where he will allegedly spend eight straight days, until March 1st. His temporary prison, a large boulder split in two with just enough room to fit the artist’s body in sitting position, and enough food and water to keep him in good physical condition over his eight days of isolation. His only connection to the outside world is a ventilation duct that keeps him from suffocating in the tight space.

“The purpose is to feel the aging stone inside the rock,” told media reporters. “There is my own breathing, and then the rock which lives, still humid because it was extracted not so long ago from the quarry. So there is that flow, that coming and going, between myself and the stone.”

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Shanghai-based artist Hong “Red” Yi is well known for her use of unconventional materials, and her latest masterpiece – a portrait of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made with 20,000 meticulously arranged sunflower seeds – is worthy of her reputation.

Inspired by Ai WeiWei’s quote – “the seed is a household object but at the same time it is a revolutionary symbol” – Red sprinkled 20,000 sunflower seeds onto a white canvas and painstakingly arranged them all by hand to recreate Weiwei’s famous portrait with his hands stretching his eyes wide open. Remarkably, she managed to capture his features in great detail, just like she had managed to do with other unusual mediums in the past.

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Most people don’t pay any attention to grass and the way it grows, but British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have always been fascinated by it and have found an ingenious way to incorporate it into their art. By manipulating the way grass grows, they are able to literally print detailed photographs onto a living wall of grass that develops according to how much light it receives.

The two artists start by covering a large canvas with water paste and rubbing germinated seeds all over it. They then cover the windows of their studio turning into a dark room, and making sure that the only light that reaches the canvas is projected through a slide of a negative photograph. They then let photosynthesis run its course, and in a few weeks time the grass-covered canvas grows into a living print of the photograph. The amount of light shining through different parts of the negative determines which parts of the canvas turn out a vibrant green, and which remain yellow and undeveloped, making the details of the image clearly visible from a distance.

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Body Marbling stations have been popping up at festivals across the United States and people are already calling it the future of body art. It’s based on a centuries-old technique called marbling, which involves applying colors to the surface of water and imprinting the designs on various surfaces, from paper and fabric to metal. But one company has figured out a way to make it work on human skin, and the results are visually stunning.

Body Marbling is the brainchild of College for Creative Studies (CCS) alumni Brad Lawrence. Diagnosed with chronic tendonitis in his wrists at the age of 23, he could no longer practice his biggest passions, drawing and sculpting, but he didn’t let that stop him from expressing his artistic talent. Motivated by his friend and Purple Heart Marine, Michael Zach, Brad got into abstract painting as a form of therapy, and started experimenting with marbling. Together, they started Black Light Visuals, a company that relies on marbling to create all kinds of “trippy” looking products, from hats and shirts to bags and backpacks. In 2013, they introduced body marbling at the Electric Forest Festival, which allowed people to turn their arms into psychedelic artworks for a few hours. Everybody loved it, and since then Body Light Visuals marbling stations have become popular at festivals all across the U.S..

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Pink is a nice color, but PINK is way better. Created by British artist Stuart semple, after a decade of working with paint manufacturers from around the globe, PINK is the world’s pinkest pink. If you’re interested, you can buy 50 grams of it for $4.95, unless your name is Anish Kapoor.

In 2014, Indian artist Anish Kapoor shocked the art world when he acquired exclusive rights to use the world’s blackest black in his art. Developed by a company called NanoSystems, “Vantablack” is composed of a series of microscopic vertical tubes, and when light hits it, it is continually deflected between the tubes, essentially becoming trapped. Vantablack absorbs 99.96 per cent of light, which makes it the darkest pigment known to man.

Originally created for military and astronomic purposes, Vantablack also sparked the interest of artists around the world, who dreamed of using it in their works. So when NanoSystems announced that Indian artist Anish Kapoor had been granted exclusive rights to use the world’s darkest black, everyone was furious. That includes Stuart semple, who is trying to make a point by making his pinkest pink available to everyone, except Anish Kappor.

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