Ivan Djuric, a talented pyrographer from Serbia, creates incredibly detailed portraits of celebrities by burning them onto pieces of wood using a special tool.

Pyrography, as an art form, can be traced back thousands of years, with evidence of its early existence discovered in countries like China, Egypt and the ancient Roman Empire, but modern artists have really elevated pyrography to an unprecedented level. take Serbian artist Ivan Djuric, whose incredibly detailed portraits rival black-and-white photographs in terms of realism. Using a pyrography tool, he applies varying and precise amounts of pressure to change the intensity of the burn, thus achieving various tones and contrasts.

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Brazilian artist Sheila R. Giovanni specializes in incredibly detailed, hand-drawn portraits of celebrities, some of which cannot be told apart from high-resolution photographs.

Over the last twelve years, we’ve featured some talented portrait artists on Oddity Central, but Sheila R. Giovanni is definitely one of the best. Using only colored pencils, she is able to create photo-quality masterpieces perfect to the tiniest of details. Looking at some her best works, it’s no surprise that Sheila can spend up to 100 hours on a single project, as her attention to detail is pretty obvious. From expertly-placed shading and glows, to strands of hair and even the reflections in her subjects’ eyes, Giovanni’s artworks really are almost as life-like as photographs.

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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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Li Hailing, a barber from Lingbao, in central China’s Henan province, uses leftovers from his day job to fuel his real passion – art. He collects the hair that he cuts at his salon and, in his spare time, arranges the thousands of strands to create stunningly-realistic celebrity portraits.

Li, whose inspiration comes from sand painting, uses the same techniques for his hair paintings – he sprinkles hair onto a canvas with his hands and arranges them until recognizable portraits emerge. There is no glue involved, so the hair can all be blown off with a simple swift wave of the hand, leaving nothing behind on the canvas. Li photographs each piece of hair art before he destroys it and moves on to the next. It takes him a minimum of two hours to finish each hair painting.

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Natasha Kinaru is a beautiful, young Russian artist whose pencil and pastel drawings of celebrities are incredibly realistic. So realistic, that they are often confused with digitally ‘enhanced’ photographs.

“I am inspired by people, so different, beautiful, interesting, mysterious, bright, talented,” said 21-year-old Natasha. “Drawing allows you to see them closer, try to guess the character, to convey mood, emotion. If it works – a portrait (is) alive, looking at it you can see the spark in his eyes and painted soul of the artist.” Some of her most popular drawings feature subjects like Benedict Cumberbatch (as Sherlock Holmes), Daniel Craig, Jim Parsons (of The Big Bang Theory fame) and Leonard Nimoy (Spock in the original Star Trek series).

Natasha said that she doesn’t draw for fame. In fact, anyone can sit down with her for a chat and even pick up a few tips on sketching. She makes her drawings using a complicated technique that involves layers. Using pencils of different softness, she creates tones, then draws the small details, completes the background shading and aligns the last layer. The end result is a character that is so alive and eyes that are so penetrating it’s almost impossible to believe it’s all done by hand, with pencils.

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Ever dreamed of having your face immortalized in expensive lipstick? No, well, you can, thanks to Singapore-based artist May Sum, who has made a name for himself by carving expensive lipsticks from top brands in the makeup industry into detailed busts of various celebrities, from Lady Gaga to Audrey Hepburn.

Some women would kill for a stick of lipstick from established brands such as Yves Saint Laurent or Estee Lauder, but artist May Sum doesn’t think twice before butchering them into oily busts of popular fashion icons. It’s not clear what kind of tools he uses during the carving process, but considering the size of his medium, they must be pretty tiny and precise. Although his lipstick busts aren’t exact replicas of the characters he aims to depict, the Singaporean somehow manages to always nail he details that define his muses. For example, Lady Gaga is easily recognizable by her unmistakable hairdo and large glasses, while Coco Channel can be distinguished by her signature hat and pearls. May Sum can carve sticks of lipsticks into anything from animals to sceneries and customs portraits, but she is most famous for her “Strong Women” series.

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Using regular ballpoint pens, UK-based artist Gareth Edwards draws incredibly realistic portraits of celebrities like Audrey Hepburn, Walt Disney, Natalie Portman and Humphrey Bogart with Candy Toxton.

“I began working in ballpoint pen because I was to lazy to sharpen a pencil, or put away my paints at the end of the day,” Gareth Edwards explains the choice of his medium. “The simplicity of the ballpoint pen first appealed to me at school. The initial scribbles I did then, have since become an addiction in trying to create a drawing that is so realistic its deceives its audience into thinking such a detailed piece couldn’t have been created with such a humble source.” And indeed, some of his celebrity portraits look so life-like it’s almost impossible to believe they are more that just artistic black-and-white photographs.

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Paper towel painting is a popular children’s learning activity, but American artist Ken Delmar is determined to turn it into a proper art form. For the last eight months, he has been using the flimsy kitchen disposables as canvases for detailed and vibrantly colored artworks.

71-year-old Ken Delmar has been painting most of his life, but he never imagined he would one day be exercising his artistic talents on paper towels instead of the linen canvas he normally used. The Connecticut-based artist had the epiphany one evening in early January of this year, while preparing to close his studio. He was using a paper towel to clean his brushes and knives when  he noticed the paint on the fragile paper looked more brilliant and energetic than the one he had spent so much time spreading on a regular canvas. He figured it was because the paint was being absorbed by the paper which gave it more depth and layers of richness, and started thinking of ways of ways to prevent the colors from blending into one another, or have them blend in an interesting way. He experimented with various paper towel brands and different consistency oil paints, until he found the perfect combination. The colors were astonishing and the unusual canvas made his works “edgy and different”.

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For the average illustrator, scribbling isn’t the best way to create realistic-looking portraits. But then again, Vince Low isn’t your average illustrator. The Malaysian artist somehow manages to produce impeccable portraits of some of Hollywood’s greatest actors using only childish scribbles.

The lead illustrator of Malaysian advertising agency, Grey, Vince Low has an impressive portfolio of stunning artworks, but his latest portrait series, called Faces, is particularly eye-catching. That’s because the stunning depictions of stars like Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman, Will Smith or Leonardo Di Caprio were all done exclusively with scribbles on blank white canvases. Most people would have a hard time capturing their unique features using classic drawing techniques, but he creates highly accurate facial representation just by overlapping thousands of swirling lines. Amazing or what?

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To celebrate Beyonce’s recent return to a UK stage, after the Glastonbury festival in 2011, Oreo commissioned food artist Michelle Wibowo to create a tasty portrait of the popular singer from nearly 4,000 Oreo pops.

For those of you who don’t yet know about Oreo pops, they’re are delicious treats made from crushed Oreo cookies mixed with Philadelphia cream cheese. Michelle enlisted the help of former Atomic Kitten member Jenny Frost and her son Casper to celebrate Beyonce’s return by making a scrumptious portrait of her from 3780 Oreo pops of different consistencies. The edible artwork required six weeks of careful planning, and crushing the cookies, mixing them with the cream cheese, rolling every single pop by hand and placing them at the exact right place to create the detailed image needed another eight hours of work. The five foot by eight foot portrait numbered  2244 dark pops and 1536 lighter pops. “When I was asked to create a pop icon portrait using just Oreo pops, new mum and superstar Beyoncé seemed the natural choice,” Michelle Wibowo said about the project. “It took a long time to map the exact position for each pop and create a recognizable likeness, but the hardest part of the process was trying not to eat it!”As a huge Oreo fan, I can relate…Beyonce however, can’t. The former Destiny’s Child lead singer is said to have banned junk food from her global tour, as she turned to healthy snacks such as almonds and oatcakes to maintain her tone figure. More junk food for the rest of us, I guess…

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Anna Sophia Matveeva, from Makiivka, Ukraine creates sticky portraits of celebrities from a very unusual material – used chewing gum. Every one of her artworks numbers over 1,000 pieces of chewed gum.

22-year-old Anna Sophia Mateeva says she came up with the idea of making art with chewing gum by accident. She was traveling with a friend in a car and they were both chewing on the rubbery treat when she realized the elastic texture of the gum made it an ideal art medium. She found a few brands of colored bubble gum and decided to give it a go, only it wasn’t as easy as she thought. Instead of chewing on every piece of gum, Anna tried soaking them in water and then modelling them with her hands, but she noticed the material became crumpled and would not stick to the canvas. The artist later learned it’s an enzyme in our saliva that makes the gum such a great material to work with, so she started chewing away at her provisions, until she realized it was impossible for her to chew all the gum she needed, by herself. And this is where it gets disgusting…

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I’ve never been a fan of geometry, but I found Josh Bryan’s artistic use of a basic geometric shape simply irresistible. The 20-year-old English artist uses triangles of various sizes to create incredibly detailed portraits of celebrities he calls triangulations.

“The creative process is quite simple,” Bryan told My Modern Metropolis.  “I make sure the image I use as a reference isn’t too well-known, even though the subjects are. I then map triangles over the face drawing, around the different tones on the face. The lines are added in afterwards to determine the amount of tone needed in each triangle.” When I first saw some of his works, I was convinced they were digital renderings made with advanced software like Adobe Illustrator, but it turns out every line is drawn by hand with black fineliner pens. After examining these incredible artworks more carefully, I noticed some of the lines weren’t perfectly straight, proof that the almost computer-like portraits were indeed drawn by a human hand.

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Korean artist Kim Dong Yoo creates amazing portraits of various icons like Audrey Hepburn or Michael Jackson, made up of hundreds of smaller painted portraits that either support or contradict the main subject of the artwork.

Over the years, we’ve featured some truly interesting celebrity portraits on Oddity Central, like Jason Mecier’s pill portraits, or Jason Kronenwald’s chewing gum creations, but we’ve never seen anything like Kim Dong Yoo’s works. This incredibly talented artist painstakingly paints hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of miniature portraits by hand, using them as smaller piece of a much bigger, unbelievably detailed portrait. His portraits look a lot like the stamp paintings of Peter R. Mason, only instead of using recycled stamps to recreate the faces of many historical and Hollywood icons, the Korean painter actually paints every one of the little images that make up the big portraits.

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Whether in hunting or warfare, bullets are usually used for killing, but artist David Palmer has found a way to use these instruments of destruction to create beautiful celebrity portraits.

John Lennon, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy were all great men, with one tragic thing in common – they were all killed by a bullet. Now, artist David Palmer has chosen to create portraits of these icons using probably the most unusual medium – bullet shells. After collecting enough bullet casings, the artist puts them together to create a metal canvas, and using a small hand torch darkens the ends of the bullet casings, creating incredibly detailed portraits. Using such a seemingly inappropriate art medium like bullets to depict their victims, Palmer hopes viewers  will “see the miracles that can arise from choosing to create rather than destroy.”

If you find bullet art interesting, you might want to check out the awe-inspiring miniature holy places made by Al Farrow, entirely out of bullets.

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Long-gone are the days when painting was strictly done with specialized tools, like brushes, on canvases. Nowadays artists use anything from remote-controlled toy cars to Molotov cocktails to express their talents. So it should come to know surprise Kyle Lambert uses just one finger and the Apple iPad to create detailed celebrity portraits.

Kyle Lambert is a young English artist who specializes in portraits rendered using an iPad tablet and an $8 app, called Brushes. He only uses one finger as the brush, but judging by the detailed outcome, you’d think he has a whole set of professional tools and paints. Lambert starts out by sketching the basic facial proportions, drawing simple lines where the mouth, nose and eyes should be, making sure he gets the shape of the sitter’s head just right. It looks like the kind of sketch even I could do, but he says it’s the most important part of making a portrait, because it serves as the framework for the entire piece.

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