California artist Merry Coor is using her skills to help people preserve the memory of their loved ones in the form of breathtaking pieces of jewellery. She uses cremated ashes of the deceased to create stunning beads that are lovingly crafted by hand.

The process begins with Coor mailing an envelope and a tin box to clients who display interest in her work. They use these to send her ashes, along with any photos or stories relating to their loved one. Once she receives the materials, she begins the process of creating the bead, keeping the individual in mind the whole time. Merry said that she tries her best to imbibe each piece with good intentions and respect.

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Tian Haisu is the world’s first roller-skating artist – she cleverly combines her love of art and ice skating to create beautiful paintings. She specializes in traditional Chinese landscapes, but has long-since ditched the calligraphy pen for a pair of skates!

Tian, who started painting at the age of three, says that painting with skates makes her feel ‘one with her art’. Through this medium, she wants to give the traditional form of painting a ‘new lease of life’. To create these unique paintings, Tian uses a modified pair of skates with a pot of black paint attached to the wheels. She puts them on and skates in deliberate patterns over a large canvas.

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Jewelry designer Hugh Power is being hailed as a real-life King Midas, after making it his life’s mission to transform the most mundane everyday objects into opulent gold jewelry.

The Beverly Hills-based artist runs ‘House of Solid Gold’, a company that specializes in turning mundane objects like glasses or earbuds into luxurious gold-plated accessories that sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Need anything made of gold? Power’s your man. He once made a gold toothpick for rap superstar Snoop Dog, because that’s what you need to scoop out food from between your gold teeth, but his collection of gold accessories includes gold shoelaces ($14,995), gold earbuds (14,995), gold chopsticks ($1,695), gold glasses ($75,000) and even a gold-plated, diamond-encrusted football ($375,000).

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Seattle-based Bridget Beth Collins mixes her love of nature with her interest in art to create stunning collages out of colorful flower petals, leaves, twigs and whatever plant materials she can get her hands on.

Collins, gathers materials for her collages from the areas surrounding her home in Ravenna, in Seattle. She then arranges the pieces into intricate shapes, using the natural colors to create a sense of depth. Through her intrinsic understanding or color and texture, she is able to transform flower petals into feathered birds, berries into sea creatures, and leaves into human faces.

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A heavy downpour can spoil the best of plans, but who says you can’t have fun with a bit of rain? Proving the fact is Seattle-based magician and artist Peregrine Church, with his rain-activated street art, called ‘rainworks’. These paintings are invisible to the naked eye when dry, only making an appearance when it rains!

Church said that he’s passionate about making things that make the world a more interesting place. “Rainworks are pieces of street art that only appear when they’re wet,” he explained, “and they’re messages or images designed to make people’s rainy day a little bit better.” He calls it the “ideal Seattle art” because of the constant rains in the city.

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51-year-old German artist Ragna Reusch-Klinkenberg is an expert at carving miniscule figures out of toothpicks and pencil tips that are so tiny you need a magnifying glass to actually see them properly! Some of Ragna’s figurines include animals like cats and giraffes, inanimate objects like toothbrushes, and even famous politicians.

Ragna, who holds a degree in graphic design, says her real passion lies in working with wood. She’s been passionate about carving since her childhood. She started carving erasers at school using small forks and later moved on to carving wooden clothespins and selling the miniatures she made at craft markets.

“Once I had forgotten my clothespin blanks, but I found a toothpick in my pocket,” she recalled. So she tried working with it, and fell in love right away.

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Given the fact that pigs are mostly raised for slaughter, it seems rather pointless and cruel to spend hours inking them with intricate tattoos. But believe it or not, tattooed pig skins are actually fetching a handsome price in China – up to $70,000 per hide!

These special pigs are inked under anaesthesia, with a variety of designs including Disney characters, Louis Vuitton logos, and even patterns that are popular with Russian prison inmates. Three artists work simultaneously on each pig, and their skin is later massaged and moisturised by carers. Once the pigs reach the end of their lives, their skins are sold to collectors for tens of thousands of dollars. One canvas featuring Disney characters, for example, was sold to Chanel and made into two bags.

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Texas-based artist John Bramblitt perceives the world and everything in it through color. Fear, for instance, he says is a “red with a lot of black mixed in. It’s almost like the color of blood and dirt or soil – it’s really deep.” His paintings are stunningly vivid, bursting with color and texture. Ironically, Bramblitt is blind.

The 37-year-old has been suffering epileptic seizures since the age of two. As he grew older , the seizures became more and more frequent. “There would be months I’d have so many seizures I couldn’t count them,” he said. His vision gradually began to deteriorate since age 11 – at first it would become blurry and then eventually clear up. But with time, it cleared up less after each episode, and by 2001 he had become completely blind.

The loss of vision was a terrible blow for Bramblitt, sending him into what he calls the “deepest, darkest hole” of depression. “All of the hopes and dreams that I had for my life; all of the plans for what I would do after I graduated school were gone,” he said.

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While traditional forms of pointillism involve adding distinct dots of color in patterns to form an image, Korean artist Jihyun Park does the opposite. He inverts the art of pointillism by puncturing dots into paper instead of adding them.

Using incense sticks, Park burns thousands of tiny holes into rice paper, until recognisable patterns of clouds, mountains and trees emerge. His project, titled ‘Incense Series’, consists of completed drawings mounted on varnished canvases. So the holes in the paper allow the viewer to see shadows while the white canvas reflects light.

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While most rosaries these days consist of glass or wooden prayer beads, there was a time when wealthy Europeans used ‘prayer nuts’ – minutely detailed, small-scaled boxwood carvings. Each nut was a masterpiece in itself, decorated on the interior and exterior with intricate carvings representing Biblical stories.

The delicate wooden orbs were designed to be worn on a rosary, or on a belt by members of the nobility or wealthy merchant classes in northern Europe. At times, fragrant substances may have been inserted into the orbs, so that the nuts may have served as pomanders as well.

Recent studies suggest that prayer nuts of the early 16th century were reduced to such a small scale that they might have become impractical to use. The religious significance might have faded away, and these nuts may have later been made just to be studied and marveled at, as private collectors’ items.

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Alexander Zhuikov, a student from Novosibirsk, Russia, was recently in the news for his highly realistic snow sculpture of a life-size tank. It took him a month to create the frozen masterpiece, which he later entered into a contest held by the makers of popular online game World of Tanks.

Alexander, 20, began his project by downloading various tank drawings from the internet. He chose a spot in his grandmother’s garden and with the help of his friends, he cleared the place by shoveling  about 20 tonnes of snow. He then set about building the snow machine and making a shield to protect it from the sun, using simple tools like spades, knives and trowels. He even created a self-propelled cabin that can be accessed through a hatch. Everything is made of snow, except for the rope, barrel, and other small parts.

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Oregon-based artist Natalie Fletcher is an expert at turning human bodies into optical illusions. Her artworks may seem cleverly photoshopped, but the illusions are in fact painted directly on to the skin!

Her project, aptly named ‘Just an Illusion’, features human canvases that are painted in bright base colors like cyan, fuchsia, yellow and green. She cleverly makes use of black contour lines to fool the eye into thinking that parts of the model’s torso are distorted. Some of them appear twisted, while others seem to have a gaping sinkhole in the center. She creates the illusion of depth by shading and positioning the lines.

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Lianne Moseley is not your average makeup artist. While she has a full-time job doing bridal makeup, her real passion lies in painting faces to resemble three-dimensional cartoon characters!

The 25-year-old said that her passion for comics began as a child – she would spend hours sketching Sailor Moon after school and pour over her brother’s graphic novels. She also picked up all her makeup skills growing up. “My mom sold catalogue cosmetics and right from the start, I just got right into it,” she said. “In high school instead of studying I spent a lot of time practicing and doing friend’s makeup.”

Although Moseley has been painting faces for over two years, she recently started doing the comic-style makeup that has made her so popular. “When I first did Archer, I posted it on my Facebook page and my friends liked it but I didn’t have a big following but my brother really liked it and he posted it on Reddit,” she said. “Just last night Ashton Kutcher shared an article on my work on his Facebook page.”

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28-year-old Noortje Zijlstra is a part of a new group of Dutch artists who are gaining recognition for their fusion of taxidermy and art. Noortje, in particular, takes the macabre practice of taxidermy to the next level – some of her pieces include a white dove’s head mounted on a shuttlecock,  a stuffed squirrel standing on its hind legs with a test tube in its throat serving as a flower holder, and a single preserved baby chicken leg mounted on a wooden stand, covered in fluffy white feathers. Her studio is also home to a family of mice with their hides replaced by decorative colored sugar.

“My work fuses taxidermy and art, sometimes creating work that may shock or even revolt, but I hope it serves as a catalyst for conversation,” she said. Her latest work involves a frozen crow carcass; she’s not yet sure what it’s going to become, but she hopes that the final piece gets people talking. During an interview with AFP, she demonstrated how she cuts into the bird’s breastbone before removing its insides. “This is what I do,” she said. “I take its ‘jacket’ off and use it as a medium for art. As soon as that happens, it ceases to be a dead animal.”

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Alberto Frigo is a man on a mission – for the past 11 years the 36-year old Italian has been photographing every single object that his right hand has touched. And he plans on continuing the bizarre project until he reaches retirement in the year 2040.

Frigo said that he had been fascinated about the idea of recording his life many years before he began the project. He tried embedded cameras for a while, but found the experience frustrating. Writing a journal did not appeal to him either, because the writing eventually fades.

The idea finally came to him in September 2003, and he started photographing every object his right hand came into contact with. Soon, he got so addicted to it that he simply couldn’t stop. And now it’s become a habit. “At this stage, my left hand now naturally photographs my right hand using objects without me really thinking about it.”

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