Sculptures create shadow faces

NYC artist Kumi Yamashita, whose thread/nail portraits Cory posted about previously, also creates head-spinning artworks from carefully-placed objects, a single light source, and shadows. "Light & Shadow".
LINK: Boingboing

MC Escher, Images of Mathematics...

Escher's work covered a variety of subjects throughout his life. His early love of portraits, Roman and Italian landscapes and of nature, eventually gave way to regular division of the plane.. Over 150 colorful and recognizable works testify to Escher's ingenuity and vision. He managed to capture the notion of hyperbolic space on a fixed 2-dimensional plane as well as translating the principles of regular division onto a number of 3-dimensional objects such as spheres, columns and cubes. A number of his prints combine both 2 and 3-dimensional images with startling effect.. His art continues to amaze and wonder millions of people all over the world. In his work we recognize his keen observation of the world around us and the expressions of his own fantasies. . M.C. Escher shows us that reality is wondrous, comprehensible and fascinating.... LINK: Youtube

Nail and String Portrait Art

Designers Pamela Campagna and Thomas Scheiderbauer take up to a month to work on each of their complicated artworks, but the outcome is certainly worth the time they put in. After analyzing an old photo they begin hammering nails into the canvas until they come up with a pixelated outline of the artwork, after which they start connecting the dots with thread. That’s easier said than done, and looking at how clean yet detailed their portraits turn out, they must have a great deal of patience. LINK

The Incredible Wire Sculptures of Ivan Lovatt

Artist Ivan Lovatt has recreated the faces of celebrities such as Michael Jackson or The Beatles, using nothing but chicken wire.

Ivan Lovatt is one of those artists who are always looking for new media to experiment with, and for him chicken wire proved to be just what he needed. Before starting to mold chicken wire into intricate portraits, Ivan used it to give structure to some of his earlier sculptures. At one point, he began creating wildlife out of the unusual medium, and as his skills developed, he moved to celebrity portraits.

Most of his wire portraits take over a month to complete and about one and a half times larger than life size. Somehow, he manages to twist, bend and pin the wire in such a way that his portraits end up so detailed you can actually see every hair on their head. He became a professional sculptor six years ago, and since then , his works have been displayed in galleries and museums all around the world. LINK

Photographer Makes Creative Portraits from Fruits, Vegetables and Flowers

Klaus Enrique Gerdes, a New York City photographer, has created a series of original portraits made exclusively from vegetables, fruits and flowers.

Gerdes told the PDN Gallery that the idea for his organic portraits first came to him while working with leaves. ”While I was photographing a human eye that was peeking out amongst hundreds of leaves, it occurred to me that I could actually utilize leaves to construct portraits or masks.” It just evolved from there and he started using fruits, vegetables and flowers. LINK

Artist Writes Detailed Portraits of Dogs

Florida-based artist Stephen Kline has created a new artistic technique that allows him to draw detailed portraits of dogs, using only text. For example he can draw the portrait of a poodle just by writing the word ‘poodle’ a few hundred times. You’d think writing the same word so many times would eventually get boring even for the most patient artist, but Stephen has so far created hundreds of these brilliant litographs of every dog breed you can think of.

Stephen Kline introduced his Lines of Language technique in 1999, and since then he’s gained thousands of art-collecting fans from 20 different countries and every state in the US. His litographs have so far generated tens of thousands of dollars for dog rescue centers around the world. LINK, Via: Youtube

RUNNING BEAR

Johnny Preston doing Running Bear...Indian Pictures. LINK: Youtube

Portraits of the Fallen

This is a story about an artist in Utah who paints the portraits of the fallen. She has painted 250 of them and brought out of love to the surface of a canvas, visual memories to be given to the families of these fallen soldiers. She does what she can to praise them. She uses her talents to bring them back, to make their presence available to them again. LINK

Celebrity Portraits Made from Their Own Trash

Through uncertain methods, San Francisco-based artist Jason Mecier convinces celebrities to donate personal trash to them. He turns the individual contributions into portraits of each celebrity:

He uses junk and discarded items donated by top stars, so yes…that Trojan condom box in the top left corner of Tina Fey‘s portrait actually came from Tina herself. Mecier has spent over 10 years creating outrageous portraits and is now so popular that stars contact him directly and pay $1,500 for a portrait, which he gladly makes from a bag of their junk that they provide.

Celebs who have asked for the portraits include Chris Rock, Pink, Tori Spelling, and Chelsea Handler, whose portrait includes empty vodka bottles, a Snuggie box, Martini glasses, bottle opener, buttons, batteries, chapstick, dice, pens, badges and movie tickets.

Link, Via: Crackajack | Artist’s Website | Via: Neatorama

PAPER FACE PORTRAITS

It takes a lot of skill and creativity to pull off something like this. LINK: UniqueDaily

Typewriter portraits are the right type of art

If you thought an old typewriter was just for producing letters on, think again - one artist is using ancient manual typrewriters to create astonishingly lifelike portraits of famous people.

Keira Rathbone hit on the idea of using manual typewriters – some 70 years old – as her paint brushes.
Working from her studio in Chiswick, London, and throughout the city, Keira turns the platen or roller to move the paper and selects different characters to make the shapes she wants. The 27-year-old artist from Dorset decides which of her 30 typewriters to use and creates faces and objects using numbers, letters and punctuation.
She said: ‘I love using a typewriter to draw. It’s an enjoyable process and a unique way of creating imagery. I often go around London and just sit there with a typewriter drawing what I can see or doing portraits.
‘People’s reaction is usually to say, ‘‘It’s amazing’’.’
Keira first got the idea to use a typewriter to make pictures while at university.


Over the last seven years she has ‘painted’ David Miliband, playwright Bonnie Greer and former Miss World Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai.
She has created magazine covers and appeared at events and festivals. Some of her portraits can take up to three weeks to do.
Her work is on display at the Montcalm hotel near Marble Arch in the West End. LINK

Incurable Optimism: 100 Portraits

www.patricktheoptimist.org

"QUOTE" This video of me, my family and my quest to paint 100 portraits of incurable optimists before I die. Visit my website to find out more about the portraits. LINK: Youtube

Incurable Optimism: 100 Portraits

www.patricktheoptimist.org
"QUOTE" This video of me, my family and my quest to paint 100 portraits of incurable optimists before I die. Visit my website to find out more about the portraits.

Filmed and produced by Baby Creative
Track: Reasons to be Cheerful Pt. 3 (Jankel-Dury-Payne)
© 1979 London Publishing House Ltd & Warner Chapell Music Ltd. Used by permission. LINK: Youtube

Celestial Soul Portraits

Erial Ali creates Celestial Soul Portraits.

After Erial Ali has had a phone consultation with you, you send him a high-quality photo of yourself. An image that represent how you like to be seen. Erial meditates and 'tunes into you,' to 'get your unique Essence.' Once Erial really 'gets who you are,' he magically transforms the image you provided into a Celestial Soul Portrait of you. LINK: The Presurfer

Awesome Portraits

Awesome portraits, mainly women read more..."

Phil Hansen Art

A pointalized portrait of each victim of The
Green River Killer was made and then
photocopied. The portraits were then cut out by
hand and placed by hand to make a portrait of
Gary Ridgeway. There are almost 12,000 victim
portraits.

Be sure to go to this LINK where you are able to zoom in and out on the photo. Via: Youtube

James Gurney's primate portraits

Dinotopia creator James Gurney just posted his 1000th entry on his art blog, Gurney Journey, and to celebrate, he posted a list of his most popular blog entries.

One of them is about his trip to the North Carolina Zoo in 2008, where he drew portraits of the great apes there.

James Gurney's Gorilla Portraits, Via: Boingboing

Portraits of child beauty pageant participants

Photographer Susan Anderson took a series of absolutely surreal portraits of young children participating in beauty pagents. She compiled the work in a book, High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Pageants. You can view many of the images on Anderson's site as well. From the powerHouse Books site: Via: Boingboing

High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Pageants

My view point is--This is SOOO wrong in so many levels....

Jane Bown's portraits

Jane Bown retrospective: Groucho Marx, SJ Perelman and Kenneth Tynan, 1964

From Nixon to the Beatles, Bette Davis to U2… Over the past 60 years, The Observer's Jane Bown has photographed many of the world's greatest personalities. On the eve of her retrospective, she talks to Robin McKie about her life's work. LINK

The Observer's longest serving photojournalist and one of the UK's pre-eminent portrait photographers, Jane Bown talks candidly about hanging out with the Fab Four and persuading Samuel Beckett to have his picture taken.

Her definitive collection can be seen in her new book, Exposures, and at an exhibition of her work at Kings Place in London until 21 November 2009. Then touring to University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne from 8 January to 26 February 2010. Here also is a (link) to a video that I found interesting.

Tattooed Portraits

People are doing tattooed portraits for ages. But tattoo fashion is changing.

I would get this one, it is awesome. LINK