Maisie Matilda, a 24-year-old artist from the UK, is being credited for shining a bright spotlight on the fascinating but dying art of book fore-edge painting.

Matilda had been painting for a long time, but she only started experimenting with fore-edge painting during the first COVID-19 lockdown, when she found herself with lots of time on her hands. The self-taught artist went viral at the end of 2021, after posting videos of her work on the fore-edge of a J.R.R. Tolkien book on social media. Her TikTok videos got millions of views, and the young artist found herself giving interviews to some of the world’s largest news outlets. She has been riding this wave ever since, and she currently has over half a million loyal fans on Instagram alone.

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Serge Feeleenger is a self-taught Belarussian artist who gained notoriety in the art world for allegedly inventing the ‘ten brushes’ painting technique, where he attaches a brush to each of his fingers and uses them simultaneously.

Guiding a single paintbrush on a canvas to produce a somewhat decent work of art is virtually impossible for most people, but can you imagine painting with ten brushes at the same time? Sounds pretty messy, but there is one man who has been perfecting this unique technique for over a decade. Serge Feeleenger apparently got the idea for painting with multiple paintbrushes at the same time after becoming annoyed with having to regularly change brushes during the artistic process. First, he found a way to attach three brushes to the fingers on his right hand, and after getting used to them, he added two more brushes to his left hand. Before long, he had a brush attached to every finger on both his hands.

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German artist Werner Härtl has carved out a truly unique niche for himself – he is currently the only known artist who uses diluted cow dung to create sepia-style paintings.

Here at Oddity Central, we’ve featured some funky art mediums in the past, from the artist’s own blood as paint, to dead cockroaches as canvases for tiny paintings, but in terms of weirdness, few things come close to Werner Härtl’s chosen medium. The German artist started experimenting with cow dung in 2012, during a stint as an agricultural worker. He packed some manure into a canister and used water to dilute it in order to obtain different sepia tones. These days, he prefers to get the ‘paint’ directly from the source, placing the canister just under the cow’s rectum as it poops. He claims that harvesting just two bovine bowel movements provides him with enough material for at least half a year.

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Elito ‘Amangpintor’ Circa is a Filipino artist who rose to fame for using his own blood to create canvas paintings that have attracted both praise and criticism over the years.

Born in a poor family that couldn’t afford to buy improper art supplies, Elito Circa experimented with a variety of unusual mediums as a child, including plums and tomatoes, but it was when he accidentally scraped his hand that he discovered the art medium that would mark his artistic career – his own blood. He quickly realized that the blood not only made his paintings more durable, as it was harder to erase from the canvas, but that it also made his artworks his own in a way that he had never imagined before.

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Sergey Artemyev is a Russian artist who specializes in oil on canvas and pastel on canvas paintings, including some of the best optical illusions we’ve ever seen.

When creating painted replicas of real-life objects, depth and thickness are some of the toughest things to pull off, which makes sense, as creating painted renditions of three-dimensional objects is anything but easy. Still, we’ve some pretty impressive optical illusions in the past, so it’s definitely doable, but few can do it better than Sergey Artemyev. The Russian artist is so confident in his ability to paint hyperrealistic replicas of various objects that he places them right next to his artworks and you still can’t tell which one is real.

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A talented Japanese artist uses airbrushes and classic brushes to transform generic plastic figurines of popular anime characters into custom works of art.

The mysterious artist, who goes by MA Man on social media, specializes in taking commercially available figurines of popular anime series from series like Dragon Ball or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and giving them the custom treatment and turning them into awe-inspiring artworks. Ma Man uses both airbrushing and classic painting techniques to emphasize the figurine’s features, like their muscles or the creases of their clothes to make them look as cool and detailed as possible.

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Talented French/Russian artist Anna Zhilyaeva has been pushing the boundaries of painting by combining the centuries-old art form with one of the most advanced technologies of our times, virtual reality.

Of all the uses for virtual reality, painting was probably not at the top of your list, and that’s exactly what makes Anna Zhilyaeva’s art so special. Using software like like Tilt-brush, Masterpiece and Anim VR, and a virtual reality headset, she is able to paint three-dimensional artworks often referred to as painted sculptures. She has performed at events all over the world, from the Louvre Museum to various technology and art festivals, and is recognized as a pioneer in the fields of virtual reality and mixed-reality painting.

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Italian artist Roberto Rizzo turns bland river stones into incredibly detailed artworks inspired by the animal kingdom. From mammals like cats and dogs, to birds and fish, there is almost no creature that Rizzo can’t turn a stone into.

Roberto Rizzo has always believed that stones have a soul, and using his mind’s eye and his talent as a painter, he has been able to turn stones into living artworks of sorts, by turning them into photo-realistic animals. He has been creating his beautiful painted stones since 1996, and is an expert at hunting for special stones that can be used as canvases for his art.

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Young Serbian artist Sanja Jankovic creates beautiful paintings by using various types of wine – red, white, rosé – instead of oil paint, watercolors or acrylics.

Sanja Jankovic has always tried turning things into art mediums, and after giving wine a go, she stuck with it. Not only did the end result look really cool, but the challenge of painting with wine was itself exciting. The talented artist was now limited to tones of red, pink and purple, but that only made things more interesting. The art form, which Jankovic has named “winerelle”, a play on ‘wine’ and ‘aquarelle’, is very unpredictable, as the wine continues to age on the canvas, so the artworks themselves develop over time.

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Self-taught artist Sergi Cadenas is a master of kinetic wall art, creating not one, not two, but three distinct portraits in a single painting, each revealed when the artwork is viewed from a certain angle.

Sergi Cadenas’ amazing artworks consist of rigid vertical strips that he paints individually, by hand. The ‘trick’ is to paint a different person on each side of each strip, so that when viewed from opposite sides, a different person can be seen. But if you stand right in front of the kinetic painting, the features of the two portraits blend to create a third portrait.

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German artist Philipp Weber specializes in hyper-realistic paintings of female models which can hardly be distinguished from high-resolution photographs at first glance.

Born in 1974 in Rostock, Germany, Philipp Weber showed an inclination for the arts when he was only three-years-old, and continued to impress both his parents and his art teachers as he grew. Weber graduated from the prestigious University of Arts in Berlin in 2002 with top grades, and has been wowing art critics with his awe-inspiring hyper-realistic paintings. Looking at how incredibly detailed his artworks can be, it’s easy to see why some of them can take the artist months, sometimes even years to complete.

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At just seven years of age, Mikail Akar is already a well-known name in the art world. His paintings sell for thousands of dollars all over the world, and he has already been given the nickname “Preschool Picasso”.

Born in Germany, Mikail’s talent for painting was discovered by mistake, three years ago. His parents bought him a canvas and some handprint paint and let him get creative with them. They has already bought him plenty of toys and action figures, so they thought they’d get him something different, but they definitely weren’t expecting him to paint a masterpiece. But Mikhail did such a good job with his first canvas that his father thought his wife had painted it.

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When it comes to painting techniques that are satisfying to watch, you’ll be hard pressed to find something better than ink and water painting, the art of dropping a bit of of ink onto water-traced patterns and watching it spread.

French artist David Bayo, whose impressive pointilism portraits we featured last year, has been a lot of attention online for his ink and water painting videos for the past three years. In a 2016 interview, he revealed that he discovered the delicate art form while experiencing with various mediums to find the one that suited him best. After lost of practice, he was able to understand the interaction between ink and water and use the two to create incredible works of art.

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Nuria Salcedo is a self-taught artist who uses coffee to paint incredibly detailed illustrations and portraits of celebrities. While she also uses brown pencils for the most intricate parts of her artworks, her characters are always painted with various tones of coffee.

A trained architect, Nuria Salcedo never took art classes. She always liked drawing, but her skills are only the result of many hours of practice, her studying Architecture in school, and whatever tips she picked off online. the young Spanish artist was inspired to use coffee as a medium for her art after coming across the works of Maria A. Aristidou, another artist famous for her beautiful coffee paintings. She had been experimenting with many styles and mediums until then, but somehow coffee just seem to suit her best and she’s been painting with it ever since.

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Nadia Matievskaia, a self-taught artist from Belarus, has been making news headlines for her unusual “brush”. The young artist uses her breasts to paint, but you couldn’t tell by the details displayed in her artworks.

Nadia never trained to become a painter, in fact she dreamed of having a career in the music industry, but a year and a half ago she started taking acting lessons and discovered a hidden talent. The young artist says that the courses taught her not to be so constrained and explore her innermost feelings, but they also helped her experiment with her body and discover an unexpected way to make money. An assignment that one of her teachers gave her required her to create a painting using her breasts and try to sell it. She did exactly that, and she’s been doing it ever since.

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