Benjamin Shine is a British artist who specialises in using the folds of fabric to create detailed human figures and faces. We’ve featured some of his incredible celebrity fabric portraits in the past, but his latest series of artworks is even more impressive.

Called The Dance, Shine’s latest exhibit is on display at the Canberra Centre in Australia. It consists of two realistic human faces – one male and one female – constructed from over 2,000 meters of tulle. Surrounding the two faces are a series of dancing figures, silhouetted within the flowing fabric.

At first glance, the tulle sheets in Shine’s work seem haphazardly suspended, but he actually spent two-and-a-half months painstakingly folding, pleating, ironing and hand-sewing the netted fabric. He kept at it until each lifelike feature emerged out of the clouds of pink, purple, and blue. He later created contrasts using backlight, to highlight intricate details.

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The tulle is that netting fabric you usually see on wedding dresses and other pompous gowns, but British artist Benjamin Shine folds and presses it to create these incredible portraits that look almost three-dimensional.

Armed with a household iron, Benjamin Shine uses a single piece of tulle, sometimes as long as 50 meters to make his mind-blowing masterpieces. He uses the transparent qualities of the netting to create tones and shadows that make his portraits look like photographs when seen from afar. While paints and pencils can also be used to create that illusion of a three-dimensional artwork, the tulle really gives a portrait more texture and depth, as you can see in the photos below. We’ve seen the old clothes iron used as an art tool just a few months ago,  but Benjamin Shine is on a completely different level.

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