Insane Creations Made with Everyday Stuff

Brushing Your Teeth with the Masters

What if great taste in art and also inside your mouth could be simultaneously achieved? If you love that minty fresh taste in you feel right after brushing your teeth, you are going to love these amazing masterpieces done with toothpaste.

Some of the Old Renaissance Masters, like Botticelli and Giotto, use egg based paints for their work. Mixing bright colored pigments with water, and tempering them with a binding pigment agent like egg. Bacon grease was rejected as a binder because it made the painting too delicious thus threatening their very existence.

Atlanta based artist, Boris Delgado, ditched the egg and switched to toothpaste to re-create some of the most famous paintings in history. Like Renoir’s “Le Parisienne”, or the self portrait of everyone’s favorite mad painter Vincent Van Gogh.

Every stroke and every color is “painted” with various brands of toothpaste … including black toothpaste. Yep, black toothpaste does exists, and Boris gets it online from Japan. It is charcoal-based (that’s why it’s black) and weirdly enough it is specifically used for teeth whitening. Who knew!?

Mammoths, Gorillas and Lions … oh my!

259 million tires are discarded annually. Tires are not necessary pretty to look at, and are problematic to recycle, however, with a little imagination and creativity you may end up with something truly mind-blowing. Check this out!

A Thailand-based creative group constructs life-sized sculptures of animals, like this 9’x12’ woolly mammoth, out of thousands of rubber ribbons cut from motorcycle and bicycle tire treads. Check out King Kong … over 12 feet tall and 5,000 lbs of rubberized awesomeness!

Each sculpture in the series has an inner metal rebar and wire armature to create the underlying shape and provide support for the massive weight of the tire tread ribbons. The pieces of tire tread are layered to resemble the texture of animal fur.

Matchstick Marvels

Don’t play with matches or you’ll burn down the house! Wise advise that apparently fell on deaf ears when it came to Patrick Acton (of Gladbrook, Iowa) who fortunately grew up to become the world’s best matchstick model maker (and not a pyromaniac)

LOTR and Hobbit fans will droll over this insane version of Minas Tirith (The Great White City of Kings) made out of 420,000 individual matchsticks. An additional 24,000 small wooden blocks were used to construct the mountain which supports the huge matchstick structure. It took Patrick 3 years to construct.

For those of us who might never fly into space, check out this 1/26 scale model of the International Space Station (ISS). Construction required 8 gallons of wood glue, 282,000 matchsticks and 1950 hours to complete.

Internation Space Station (ISS)

Patrick has also created for Ripley’s matchstick replicas of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the New World Trade Center, Notre Dame Cathedral, and his newest masterpiece; a full scale steampunk locomotive/plane hybrid straight out of Jules Verne’s imagination. Believe It or Not!