California-based artist Phil Vance spends hundreds of hours creating typography portraits of historical icons entirely out of handwritten words and phrases.

From afar, Phil Vance’s typography portraits look like expertly drawn artworks, but as you draw nearer to them, you start to see that every feature is actually made up of handwritten text. Once you start deciphering all the words, you realize they are famous quotes of the subject written over and over again. The talented artist describes his art as “cross-hatching but with words.”

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Jamie Poole works mainly as a landscape painter and art teacher, but today we’re going to look at his unique style of painting with words by using shredded poetry and book text to create   incredible works of art.

WE’ve featured some pretty unbelievable text artworks in the past, from John Sokol’s hand-written portraits of famous writers, to the detailed dog portraits of Florida-based artist Stephen Kline, but English artist Jamie Poole sets himself apart by using shredded pieces of text from poetry books and novels. His works are all large scale, meaning he has to use hundreds, sometimes thousands of deconstructed text pieces to achieve the effect he’s looking for. Despite the rigidity of the material he uses for his artistic pieces, compared to the commons paintbrush or pencil, Jamie Poole always manages to nail every detail he desires, from perfectly placed shadows, to little things like the glow in his subjects’ eyes, or rebel hair strands that make them look so much more realistic.

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Ralph Ueltzhoefer probably took the saying “a picture is worth a thousands words” because he actually builds detailed images from thousands of written words.

The Mannheim-based German artist takes photos of celebrities from the Internet and recreates their portraits with words randomly-selected from Internet biographies, fragments of words and phrases, and Wikipedia articles that have come to define these famous people. Ueltzhoefer sets the white text line by line on the dark background, thus making a statement about how media defines our every day lives in a Web-centered world. His Textportraits are a symbiosis between text and photo, biography and portrait, a readable version of two different components.

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Anatol Knotek is a talented young Austrian artist whose  visual poetry artworks revolve around the written character.

Knotek’s interest in visual poetry arose around a decade ago, after a meeting with an Austrian poet. Until that time he had only been interested in painting and the classic fine arts, but after his first contact with visual poetry, he realized how fascinated he was by it, and started working primarily in this field. Since then, Anatol Knotek has become one of the world’s most celebrated artists and has had his works displayed in many art galleries around the world.

The purpose of his “written images” is to express ideas strongly bound to the written, spoken and visual language. Out of all of his works, the written portraits stand out with their complexity and level of detail.

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