Butterfly Wings
Russian artist and entomologist Vadim Zaritsky is a lifelong butterfly collector, but it saddened him to see the most beautiful part of the bugs, their wings, thrown away if they became damaged or disconnected from the body. Even before Zaritsky retired from his career as a policeman, he began creating mosaics using butterfly wings! His works include landscapes, portraits, fantasy images, and even mosaic versions of classic works.
Bottle Caps
Chicago artist Mary Ellen Crocteau works in many media. Her eight-foot self-portrait is a mosaic of bottle caps. Crocteau also posted some of the technical details of her bottle cap mosaics in case you’d like to try it yourself.
Coffee Beans
Albanian artist Saimir Strati makes huge mosaics out of varying items like nails, toothpicks, and corks. In fact, he is the Guinness World Record holder for the largest mosaics ever. The work titled “One World, One Family, One Coffee” required over 300 pounds of coffee beans, estimated to be about a million beans, to make a 269-square-foot mosaic.
Cupcakes
The London bakery Crumbs and Doilies was commissioned to assemble 10,000 cupcakes into a room-sized mosaic of a flowering cherry tree for the Japanese TV show ITTEQ. The cupcake mosaic recreated a photograph, and did it very well! See more pictures of the project at the bakery site.
Pushpins
Michigan artist Eric Daigh uses pushpins in only five colors to recreate huge photorealistic (from a distance) portraits. The advantage of pushpins is that you know how to affix them; the disadvantage is that Daigh must sort each color from variety packages. A single portrait might need more than 11,000 pushpins!
Corks
Grand Rapids artist Scott Gundersen makes portraits out of corks. The portrait shown here titled “Trisha” is composed of 3,621 wine corks! You can see Gundersen in action assembling a previous portrait of almost 10,000 corks in his time-lapse video below.
Guitar Picks
Manchester mosaic artist Ed Chapman works with various materials for his mosaics, and thought guitar picks were the appropriate medium for a portrait of guitarist Jimi Hendrix. The music mosaic was sold for £23,000 at a charity auction that benefited a cancer research center.
Rubik’s Cubes
Designer Pete Fecteau (formerly of Michigan) created a mosaic of Martin Luther King, Jr. called “Dream Big” out of 4,242 Rubik’s cubes. Each cube face has a grid of nine color stickers, and each cube had to be “solved” so as to present the right combination of pixels to render the proper gradient. The Rubik’s cubes were rented, and returned when the mosaic was disassembled. Photograph by Tori Jo.
Sprinkles
Candy sprinkles are so small that they hardly make an impact on a large mosaic. So when Canadian art student Joel Brochu made a four-foot-wide mosaic of a Beagle having a bath using candy sprinkles naturally he received a lot of plaudits. This project required 221,184 sprinkles, each of which Brochu placed by hand. Taking into account that the sprinkles he used only came in six colors and had to be placed just so to render the exact shades of the photograph he recreated it truly is an impressive piece of art.
via MentalFloss
