9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

Let's face it -- we've all tried to build a house of cards or make a sand castle at some point in our lives, but most of us get bored within a few minutes and give up. For others it may take an hour, or maybe even a few days... and there are those who devote their lives to making hugely pointless yet amazing things out of small, ridiculous material
9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

Let's face it -- we've all tried to build a house of cards or make a sand castle at some point in our lives, but most of us get bored within a few minutes and give up. For others it may take an hour, or maybe even a few days... and there are those who devote their lives to making hugely pointless yet amazing things out of small, ridiculous materials.

Such as ...

A Fully Livable LEGO House

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

It's no surprise that people can build some amazing things out of Legos. We're pretty sure all those replicas of important buildings they have in their theme parks will come in pretty handy when evolution inevitably turns us all into smurfs.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Whitespace

A re-enactment of Roosevelt's inauguration, in which he claimed he was "knee-deep in bitches."

However, some individuals have taken their obsession with tiny plastic bricks even further ... and some even manage to make a living off of it. For instance, Nathan Sawaya is a world-renowned Lego sculptor who not only sells his statues for thousands of dollars, but also exhibits them in museums around the globe. For the right price, he can make a life size Lego sculpture of anything -- including you.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Brickartist.com

If you looked like an 80s computer game character.

But perhaps the greatest feat of Lego architecture of all time was the one thought up by British television presenter James May. May enlisted the help of architects, interior designers and hundreds of people with way too much free time to build a two story house made out of 6 MILLION Lego bricks ...

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Nowpublic.com

"Wine is on the table," he called out to them. Their crotches burned with Lego anticipation.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Metro News

"Let me slip into something more comfortable," he said, returning in a Lego thong.

... and then proceeded to live in it for 24 hours. But wait -- how did he take care of, uhh, certain basic necessities in a house made entirely out of Lego? Easy: thanks to the running water connected to his Lego sink and Lego toilet.

I
Via Gnews

Also, the fact that he doesn't mind pooping on toys.

Despite the fact that an art expert valued the house at $750,000, no one was willing to buy such an exquisite piece of live-in artwork, for some reason. It has since been dismantled and presumably, those 6 million Lego pieces have been returned to the children they were originally intended for.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Wikimedia Commons

So be on the lookout for Lego pieces that smell like ass.

Toothpick Cities

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

Let's face it, toothpicks are a technology that became useless the moment dental floss was invented. Nobody knows why we continue manufacturing them; their only purpose right now is to aid people who don't want to touch canapes with their hands and don't know how to use a napkin. Stan Munro, however, figured out a much more productive use for them:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Toothpick City

Pictured: The main reason the toothpick industry remains afloat.

Stan's obsession with toothpicks goes way back to grade school, when his science teacher asked the class to build a toothpick structure that could hold an egg. While most of the class tried to figure out what was wrong with the teacher, Stan built one that held a desk. It was at that moment, presumably, that the boy decided he wanted to grow up into a man who builds big things out of small wooden picks.

m
Via Toothpick City

And then lurks behind them, apparently.

But Stan doesn't just create buildings: He makes entire cities. Plural. His first project, the aptly named Toothpick City, took him two years to complete. The sequel, Toothpick City II, consists of 40 buildings constructed with 4 million toothpicks and 45 gallons of glue. The structures take him anywhere from a day to six months.

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Via Supiri.com

"So, uh, where've you been for the past half year, Stan?"
"Expanding my toothpick kingdom."

All buildings are on a 1/64 scale and contain impressive amounts of detail, thanks to the technical drawings and satellite photos that Stan consults before starting. The most impressive part, however, is that he has managed to convince his wife that there's nothing crazy about making toothpick building his full-time job. It totally paid off, though: Toothpick City I is now on permanent display in a museum in Mallorca, Spain.

Toast "Paintings"

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

You've probably burned a lot of toast in your life, since dependable toaster technology has not advanced one iota since the device was invented. Depending on how much bread you had left, how hungry you were or how little time you had, your response was probably somewhere between "Oh, that sucks" and Samuel L. Jackson's monologue from Snakes on a Plane (only with toasts and toasters instead of snakes and planes). We're gonna go ahead and guess that you never pulled out the burnt piece of toast and framed it on a wall, though -- and that's where you've been going wrong in life, it seems. Yes, people pay real money to look at toast art:

iil olo
Via Maurice Bennett

This must have been a remarkably inept toaster.

Yep, that's toasted bread right there. Of course, Maurice Bennett, the internationally renowned toast artist, doesn't actually use a toaster to make his masterpieces; that would be silly.

He uses a blowtorch.

Maurice lives in New Zealand and gets a lot of his inspiration from Maori tribal designs, among other important parts of traditional New Zealand culture:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Maurice Bennett

The follow-up to "Smiling Peter Jackson" will be "Raging Russell Crowe."

But wait, those are like, small mini-toasts or something, right? Otherwise, his portraits would be freaking hu ...

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Maurice Bennett

... Oh.

OK, that's a lot of toast. "The Toastman" credits his first career as a supermarket owner with honing his understanding of things like display, color and food. And what more logical career progression could there be than going from stacking cans to recreating famous works of art with thousands of pieces of burnt bread?

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Maurice Bennett

He added an ice cream to the Mona Lisa because the fact that it was made of toast wasn't weird enough.

Of course, toast isn't the only breakfast food on display in museums.

Creepy Cereal Art

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Ryan Alexiev (born to Bulgarian immigrants, raised in Alaska and educated at UC Berkley, which is pretty much the definition of "confused hippie") finds his inspiration in children's cereal. Using the most colorful and sugary pieces he can find, he creates light hearted, whimsical portraits like -- no, wait, he makes shit like this:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Artbusiness.com

Is it just us, or do you just want to fill that glass case up with milk?

That's a cereal replica of Damien Hirst's famous diamond coated skull "For the Love of God." If it looks disturbingly accurate, that's because Alexiev made it using a real skull he "purchased on eBay."

Finally, someone uncovers the untapped artistic potential in cereal and uses it to tackle things like religious iconography:

SUeRAMENTUM:
Via Artbusiness.com

TER- RA LAC TELS QUOD CERE ALIS
Via Artbusiness.com

... and of course, Osama bin Laden, in this piece called O's-ama:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Ryan Alexiev

Nothing like Froot Loops to capture the fun side of a genocidal maniac's personality.

Of course, this isn't just for fun -- there's a deeper meaning behind every work. Like for instance, Alexiev explains that by making saints made of cereal he's really " how contemporary product marketing functions through appeals to our sense of -- and desire for -- the transcendental. In the Land of Milk and Cereal, we are what we eat."

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Ryan Alexiev

The fact that he looks like Cap'n Crunch's estranged son explains so much.

Full-Size Matchstick Heads

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

When we say "matchstick heads," we don't mean the upper part of the matchstick -- we mean something a little more literal:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Denoirmont.com

And a lot more insane.

David Mach is a Scottish artist who makes sculptures out of stuff like coat hangers, car tires and old newspapers. Also matchsticks. Thousands and thousands of little matchsticks. Mach uses around 30,000 matches in each of his limited-edition sculptures, and then sells them for about the same amount of money.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Denoirmont.com

For that much money we could get you a real head on a stick. There are ways.

Each sculpture takes him months to complete, since he has to painstakingly glue each one of the matches to a fiberglass or plastic structure he creates beforehand. Mach doesn't paint the sticks himself, though -- that would be crazy. Instead he has them shipped from Japan, the only place insane enough to produce matches of every color, apparently. His sculptures include representations of famous people ...

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Denoirmont.com

... deities ...

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Denoirmont.com

... and mostly angry animals.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Telegraph

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Denoirmont.com

These are pretty impressive and all, but we can't shake the feeling that they would look infinitely cooler if someone were to "accidentally" spark a lighter near them. Fortunately, Mach agrees. He often closes his presentations by setting a head on fire.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Denoirmont.com

And then laughing maniacally while staring into the sweet, cleansing flames.

Cigarette Butt Sculptures

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

Definitely the grossest entry on this list. Turns out there are a baffling amount of artists out there who look at old, soggy, stinky cigarette butts and see the building blocks of a fabulous sculpture. Like the dude who made this giant cigarette butt shell:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Beach Lovers

The shell is actually 5-feet-wide and 2-feet-tall, and considering the strict smoking laws in that state, may realistically contain every butt discarded there since the Bush administration.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Beach Lovers

Or half the ones in Courtney Love's sofa.

The same artist, Tom Deininger, also created this adorable rabbit:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Recyclart

Awwwww.

... or at least it's adorable until you find out it is made from the filthy, nicotine-filled filters of (you guessed it) discarded cigarette butts.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Recyclart

Just looking at this thing might give you cancer.

So, kids -- don't believe movies when they tell you that the life of an artist is all partying and getting laid. If Deininger is anything to go by, it's mostly picking up other people's cigarettes on a beach.

Meanwhile, in Missouri, a public art project combined the natural venn diagram of cigarettes and babies to produce this monstrosity:

Watson
Via Roadside America

It's a pacifier, if you can't tell. Yeah, we're not sure what that's about. We're guessing this is meant to put off children from smoking with how horrible it is. It's like something a stereotypical cartoon villain would create to use as bait for the giant baby he's trying to murder.

Watson
Via Roadside America

Or maybe something out of a Tim Burton movie.

M&M Mantelpieces

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

So you're hosting a fancy dinner, but then you realize you forgot to own a mantelpiece. What could you possibly use to cover your dinner table while making it look classy? Hannah Mendelsohn found the perfect alternative: ridiculous amounts of M&M's.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Hannah Mendelsohn

What excuse do we, as a race, have for not thinking of this sooner?

Mendelsohn was only in high school when she first started messing around with the idea that by arranging many, many M&M's on a flat surface you could get some pretty cool looking artwork. Eventually her dreams grew wild and her plan evolved into something much more ambitious, as she decided to make a coffee table covered in quasi-symmetrical geometric candy shapes.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Hannah Mendelsohn

"A M&Masterpiece!" - Future art history books

She never glues the candy down though (because what kind of maniac glues candy to a table?), so one bump and it could mean starting all over. Also, unlike most of the artists on this list, Mendelsohn doesn't ever have a set plan -- she just separates the different colors of M&M's, thousands in total, and wings it.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Hannah Mendelsohn

We think the carpet is made of Nerds

While her friends have encouraged her to get sponsorship for some commissioned artwork from Mars, Inc., so far Mendelsohn hasn't bothered to do that -- which means there is totally a gap in the market that you could be filling. We recommended Starbursts.

Drinking Straw Furniture

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

The one problem with having a bitchin' M&M's coffee table is that suddenly the rest of your furniture will look pretty lame in comparison. And, sadly, you can't cover a chair with chocolate candy (as we've all found out at some point in our lives). Well, that's what drinking straws are for, it turns out:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Webecoist.com

Artist Scott Jarvie says he was inspired by the inside of trees (we're thinking there was some sort of special mushroom growing in there), which naturally led him to create a chair made out of 10,000 straws -- plus a working lamp to match.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Webecoist.com

Now, he can't keep coke-head moths away from his house.

And if the thought of thousands of sharp plastic bits stabbing into your ass doesn't sound appealing to you, don't worry, there are more comfortable alternatives out there. Yes, there's more than one person in the world making chairs out of straws.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Webecoist.com

Well, obviously.

And if your straw table looks too bare without a straw sculpture on top of it, there is always ... whatever this is:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Daily Art Muse

Coral? Jimi Hendrix droppings?

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Daily Art Muse

Those are 7,000 drinking straws wrapped in 300 yards of wool and crying out in confused shock and panic. Now dunk it in a bath tub full of tequila and let everybody drink through it!

Giant Lite-Brite Portraits

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

If you were a child in the 1980s you probably had a Lite-Brite. You know, that glowing box with colored pegs you could stick in little holes (or alternatively put in your mouth and choke on, which was way more fun). If you did, you might have tried to make your mom and dad a nice picture, only to have it come off like a disfigured, utterly disappointing mess.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Photos.com

Much like yourself as a child.

Well, one artist named Steve DeFrank never gave up on that dream and made a huge Lite-Brite portrait of his parents called, quite simply, "Mom and Dad."

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via NPG

Luckily for his parents it's hanging in places like the Smithsonian, and not their living room.

You probably don't remember your Lite-Brite set coming with all those shades of flesh: That's because DeFrank hand-dyed thousands of pieces himself especially for this occasion. Also, did we mention that this is actually a full-body portrait? And no, Mom and Dad are not wearing any clothes, so click at your own risk. (Includes droopy boobs and a tiny penis, all rendered out of children's toy.)

Fortunately, other artists like Joey Syta treat their Lite-Brite art with the respect it deserves, like copying an entire medieval tapestry in 1:3 size.

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Joey Syta

Because sometimes you just have too many Lite-Brites taking up space.

Syta's website says this was done between 2007 and 2009, which probably means the unicorn alone took him like six months. Another artist named Thorin Nelson used the same materials to create this psychedelic portrait of Elvis:

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials
Via Flickr

The favorite singer of crazy people, apparently.

But none of those compare to this massive, painstaking recreation of Leonardo's "The Last Supper," which was even submitted to the Guinness Book of Records ... and lost to this even more massive shoe.

IA
Via Myspace Photos

You know the shoe people are going to Hell.

So now you know why you don't see kids playing with Lite-Brite anymore: It's all been used up by bored adults.

For more terrible wastes of time, check out 8 Guinness World Record Attempts That Failed (Hilariously) and The 8 Least Impressive Guinness World Records.

And stop by Linkstorm learn which Lite-Brite piece tastes the best.

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