Awesome Portraits

Artist M’Brick makes portraits from LEGO bricks. But rather than keeping things simple with 1×1 pixels, he uses a seemingly random assortment of parts to create depth and textures. The originals are hard to come by, but limited-edition prints are for sale at M’Brick’s Art Shop. His Frida Kahlo and Bruce Springsteen portraits are extraordinary.

We’ve previously seen art that was made by cracking sheets of glass. Artist Uncle Liu uses a pointed hammer to create tiny chips in glass, creating pointilist portraits from the indentations. You can find more of his astounding glass artworks on his page on Chinese website Douyin.

Most portraits are painted on canvas or paper. This skilled artist paints on the inside of glass bottles. The process doesn’t just require a steady hand and precision but the ability to think about images in reverse. While the results are impressive, this isn’t a unique talent – the practice of painting inside small snuff bottles dates back to the 17th century in China.

DP Truong is an expert at creating portraits using unconventional techniques. In this video, he imitated the way that a flatbed scanner captures an image, masking off a stripe to draw an image 0.5″ tall section at a time. Adding to the challenge, he drew the same image with his left hand simultaneously.

Artist Ed Fairburn creates incredible portraits by drawing intricate crosshatch patterns on maps. His precision penmanship works hand-in-hand with the underlying map lines to produce outlines of his subjects and explores the relationship between people and the world around us. You can find prints and originals of Ed’s work on his website.

Artist Justin Bateman creates incredible images using rocks he finds on the ground. Collecting and arranging various shapes, sizes, and colors of pebbles, he creates the illusion of light and shadow in his portraits. You can view more of Justin’s works on his Instagram.

South Korea-based artist Drawholic wows us with a colored-pencil portrait of Din Djarin and Grogu. The time-lapse video lets us observe the entire process from start to finish, as the rough outlines give way to color, shading, and a background that makes the image pop off of the page.

Petros Vrellis created an amazing kind of portrait inspired by philosopher Heraclitus, whose doctrine was that everything is both connected and not connected. Each image in the artist’s Out of all things one, and out of one all things is an individual abstract pattern but reveals a face when layered. Matthew 21:31 combines multiple faces.

Creating a grid over a source image can make it easier to copy or change its scale. Artist DP Truong shows us how modifying the shape of the destination grid allows him to distort an existing image, using none other than Jenna Ortega’s warped Wednesday Addams as his subject.

Located in Playas de Rosarito Centro, Mexico, the Straw Art Gallery specializes in portraits created by placing thousands of tiny pieces of naturally dyed broom grass into beeswax. We won’t spoil the subject of this particular work, so you’ll have to hit play to see the finished product.

Artist Deniz Sağdıç creates amazing works of art out of recycled junk. She has used everything from wire to bottle caps to integrated circuit chips to buttons to create her works. Every single one of her portraits is incredible, but the one of Steve Jobs is our favorite. The images in the video were on exhibit at the Istanbul Airport.

Artist Dylan Eakin is a master at drawing photorealistic images using pencils. In this video, he shows off some of his favorite portraits, all of which are indistinguishable from black-and-white photographs to the naked eye. His ability to emulate light and shadow is uncanny. Dylan sells limited-edition prints on his website.

Illustrator DP Truong chose Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow as the subject of a pencil drawing. After he finished the 21 cm (8.26 in) black-and-white portrait, he kept going. Only for the next drawing, he went with a smaller piece of paper. Then he repeated the task over and over until he got down to a 0.2 cm (0.07 in) image.

Artist and filmmakers Niall Shukla shows off Orion – an incredible portrait he created by cracking a single sheet glass. It took a lot of practice to perfect the technique, eventually tapping the glass over a thousand times to produce the 4.5-foot square portrait. He since sold it with an accompanying animated NFT.

Ben Hoblyn and Ross Montgomery of Dice Ideas make art using D6 dice as their medium. They use the six pip configurations to create shades of light and dark, resulting in monochrome images which reveal themselves the further back you stand from them. Their biggest piece so far is a tiger made from 30,000 dice.

Artist DP Truong is always coming up with clever and different ways to draw portraits. This time out, they just used a pencil, but the trick is that it was covered with thorns on every side, making it incredibly difficult to grip and sharpen without causing pain.

Hong Kong-based artist Alfred Cheng creates incredible black and white portraits using sewing thread and a circle of nails. What makes them even more amazing is that he uses a single strand of thread to create each image. Art Insider explains his painstaking process.

Artist DP Truong previously showed us how he uses a compass to draw black and white portraits. Now he’s taken that idea to another level by drawing and erasing six Marvel characters in the same spot on the same sheet of paper. The time-lapse footage is as magical as the drawings themselves.

Artist Amy Tannenbaum works in a variety of media to create her works. In addition to making portraits from twirled yarn and magazine clippings, she creates images out of tiny slivers of colored paper. Here she shows off a detailed image of a tiger that she made using the cut paper technique.

Artist Eduwoes shows off his unique ability to draw multiple portraits at the same time. It appears that he uses the center pen to doodle tiny versions of the characters in the shadows of Harley Quinn while controlling the outer pens to draw Joker and Batman. It’s also possible the time-lapse is concealing some fakery.

We previously featured Noah Kalina’s photographic memoir, composed of a selfie a day since January 2000. His previous videos had a staccato look to them, but with AI tech and the help of data scientist Michael Notter, this new video smoothly transitions his aging process over the course of 20+ years.

Artist Phil Vance paints portraits of famous people using their own words to create their images. In this time-lapse video, he builds up an image of author Hunter S. Thompson, layer by layer. His image of Dave Chappelle made from the words of his 8:46 special is equally incredible.

As we’ve seen before, DP Truong has exceptional portrait drawing skills. In this video, the artist wanted to see how long they could draw and how many Marvel characters he could crank out with a single pencil before it wore down to an unusable nub of wood and graphite.