Buying works of art can become an expensive habit, but what if you didn’t have to buy the artworks and instead lease them for however long you wanted? That’s the premise of an ingenious Japanese business that lets people rent paintings.

Casie is an innovative service that connects painters and art lovers in a whole new way. Instead of brokering the sale of artworks it offers clients the possibility of leasing them by the month. It sounds a bit strange, maybe because it just hasn’t been done before, but if people can rent designer clothes and expensive jewelry, why can’t they do the same with art? Apparently, this model benefits both artists, who are able to generate more revenue from their works in the long term, and clients, who get to keep the paintings until they get bored of them and decided to swap them for new ones.

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Inspired by the popular #gettychallenge a Russian woman has been using various household items and her own makeup skills to recreate over 100 classic paintings to great effect.

Back in late March, Saint Petersburg-based art lover Liza Yukhnyova accepted the Getty Museum’s #gettychallenge as a fun way to pass the time during quarantine, only she got so into it that she continued to recreate famous paintings long after the lockdown ended. While most people were content recreating just one famous artwork, Yukhnyova set a goal for herself to replicate a painting a day for 30 days, but she is currently on day 142 and has no plans to stop anytime soon.

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South Korean artist Young-Sung Kim has a very special talent, he can paint photographs. That may sound like a gross exaggeration, but just take a look at what he’s able produce with a paintbrush, some acrylic and mountains of talent and patience.

The old saying, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’, doesn’t really apply to Youn-Sung Kim’s art. You can stare at his incredibly detailed painting for hours and still not be able to tell them apart from high-resolution digital photographs. Kim is so good at what he does that, sometimes, he himself has trouble telling his hyper-realistic paintings from the photos that inspired them. Once, he actually mistakenly sent the press the file of a photo he took, instead of the painting he did, because they looked virtually identical to the naked eye.

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Using an artform known as “marquetry”, Rob Milam creates beautiful paintings with wood veneer.

Marquetry is defined as the composition of an image using natural wood veneer, cut into pieces and glued on a substrate, sort of like a puzzle. Every one of Rob Milam’s marquetry paintings start with a photograph. He uses Photoshop to create a black-and-white image showing the dark and light values and uses anywhere from four to sixteen different wood veneers to recreate it.

Every species of wood has a distinctive grain pattern and colors range from creamy white (holy and English sycamore), to dark brown (Brazilian rosewood) and even black (bog oak). Though he usually uses only naturally colored wood, Rob Milam sometimes makes use of artificially colored blue and green veneer, for replicating the eye’s iris.

The pieces of wood veneer are cut into pieces by the artist himself, using chisels, knives and saws.

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