Awesome Portraits

Artist DP Truong shows off another one of their unconventional portrait techniques, this time creating an image using torn-up scraps of paper. The portrait pays tribute to the late Vietnamese actor Hoang Dung. Blowing away the scraps at the end serves as a sort of cinematic goodbye.

Artist Woodboy shows off a clever technique in which he makes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln by creating a pair of turned walnut blocks which come together to form an inverted portrait of the 19th-century President. The method allows him to create four portrait halves from each turned block.

Textile artist Benjamin Shine creates amazing abstract portraits by folding and ironing pieces of tulle. The layering creates the illusion of light and shadow, bringing his imagery to life both in wall art and sculptural works. More recently, he built a large-scale piece by folding recycled HDPE netting.

Artist ZXY698 is an expert at painting wall murals. In fact, he’s so good at it that he painted a 3-dimensional facsimile of his girlfriend sitting on a park bench so he can visit with her even when she’s not around. Hopefully, she won’t fade away any time soon.

Machine learning technology continues to get more and more impressive – especially when it comes to working with images. A group of researchers from China are showing off DeepFaceDrawing, an amazing piece of software which can synthesize photorealistic human faces using nothing more than a rough pencil sketch.

Brooklyn artist James Haggerty creates images using staples as his medium. After wowing us with his Star Wars series, he made an incredible portrait of their family dog, Doxie. The finished piece is made from 75,738 staples in a variety of colors. We love how he arranged the staples to create the hair texture.

Woodburning isn’t a unique craft, but artist Hye Sea of Magnify the Sun executes it differently than others. Rather than electric tools, she uses a variety of magnifying lenses to focus bright sunlight onto a plywood canvas. If you’re interested in having a portrait commissioned, you can make an inquiry here.

Artist Samer Dabra programmed Evil Mad Scientist’s AxiDraw v3 plotter to take photographic images and reinterpret them as twisty, turny, abstract line art. By overlaying CMYK inks, the images have an appearance of being in full color. More images on Instagram.

We last checked in with photographer Noah Kalina back in 2012, who started taking a picture of himself every day back in January 2000. He’s now surpassed 20 years and more than 7200 images along the way. See how his looks have continued to change in this fascinating study of how people age and change over the years.

To pay tribute to Sir David Attenborough’s 40 years in broadcasting, artist Quentin Devine decided to create a portrait of the famed nature show narrator. What makes the image extraordinary is that his face comprises 40 different animals he’s featured in his programs over the years.

Artist Darian Mederos creates incredible portraits that appear to have been painted behind a sheet of bubble wrap. In fact, every individual bubble – and the light, shadows, and distortion that come with them, is hand-painted. Check out some of his works and process on Instagram.

Artist DP Truong is capable of drawing portraits with all kinds of interesting techniques. For this image of Will Smith inspired by Gemini Man, he used the line-by-line approach that a dot-matrix or inkjet printer would use to create an image from top to bottom.

Artist DP Truong shows off his mad compass skills as he creates a detailed portrait by drawing hundreds of concentric circles and varying the pressure of his pen to create shades of grey. Here’s another one of his images celebrating the collab between Son Tung, Snoop Dogg, and Madison Beer.

Watch in awe as illustrator drawholic starts with a blank sheet of paper, and proceeds to sketch out an impressively accurate Prismacolor pencil rendering of Pennywise the clown, as he appeared in the 2017 big screen version of Stephen King’s IT.

Filmmaker Jesse Brass introduces us to Cayce Zavaglia, who creates amazing embroidered portraits of family and friends using cotton and wool thread. While the photorealistic fronts of her images are simply stunning, the chaotic reverse sides reveal the true nature of life.

Red Hong Yi’s latest work is a giant portrait of revered artist Ai Weiwei, inspired by a quote about one of his own works. The piece was created using about 20,000 sunflower seeds carefully placed on a large canvas. As quickly as her creation comes together, it’s gone.

Artist Noah Scalin painstakingly collected hundreds of colorful stickers, from everything from kid’s play sets to Wacky Packages. He then carefully arranged each one based on hue, saturation, and brightness to create a bold and abstract portrait of himself.

Back in the ’70s you’d see kitschy string art pictures of horses, rainbows, and owls. Artist Petros Vrellis shows off an amazing modern take on the artform, which results in a greyscale portrait which emerges by following a pattern dictated by a computer algorithm.

Artist David Bayo demonstrates his painstaking process, as he creates a beautifully shaded portrait using his Rotring Rapidograph pen to place a seemingly endless flow of tiny dots. We’re not sure he actually counted to a million, but it’s amazing nonetheless.

Artist Heather Rooney shows off her incredible talent for drawing photorealistic portraits using Caran d’Ache Luminance colored pencils. Her work is so good that some of her subjects look better than they do in real life. Check out her YouTube channel for more.

Yoo Hyun makes detailed portraits and illustrations on paper without using any kind of pigment. Instead, he makes alternating columns of diagonal cuts of varying widths on paper. More on his Instagram and Facebook page.

Matt Bilfield creates bold pop art portraits which combine the cartoon style of Lichtenstein with the pointillism of Chuck Close. Each image is made from a grid of thousands of painted dowels, bringing them into focus when viewed head on.

Artist Christian Faur creates intricate portraits using hand-cast wax crayons to form pixelated pointilism. While his medium is playful, his subject matter explores everything from lost youth to economic and social crisis.