Getting better comes with a hefty price tag. With medical treatments getting more expensive and the uninsured growing in numbers, going to a hospital has become more financially painful than ever before. Thankfully, doctors and scientists are teaming up in an effort to bring medicine closer to the less fortunate. Using creativity and resourcefulness, medical practitioners are cleverly challenging the current state of medicine by developing new treatments and technologies that will be more accessible to the masses using everyday materials.

10 Bluetooth Hearing Aids

The ability to hear is a wonderful thing. Sadly, many people don’t have it. It is estimated that around 300 million people around the world suffer from some form of hearing impairment. In the United States alone, as much as 20 percent of the population report some degree of hearing loss. Although the condition is manageable through hearing aids, a lot of people simply can’t afford them. With the device costing up to US$4,000 a pair, spending money on hearing aids just wasn’t an option for many—until now.

Sound World Solutions, a Chicago based company, has created a prototype of hearing aids that use one of the most common technologies today—Bluetooth. It functions just as clearly as other hearing aids, but unlike conventional models, the Bluetooth hearing aids can be easily adjusted using your smartphone. The volume, treble, bass, and all the other sound options of the hearing aids can be attuned with a slide of a finger, eliminating the numerous visits needed to constantly readjust the device. The best part is that, at only US$300, more patients will now be able to afford the ability to hear.

9 Webcam Blood Flow Imaging

A noninvasive way to track blood flow is by the use of Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LCSI). This method is essential for treating and studying conditions like migraine and stroke by examining blood flow. To illuminate and capture images of blood flow, LCSI uses laser light and high-grade cameras. These parts are estimated at US$5,000, which is cheaper than most medical equipment but steep for hospitals in less-privileged areas.

To address this problem, researchers at the University of Texas improvised. Using a typical webcam and a laser pointer used in PowerPoint presentations, the researchers were able to create a blood flow imaging system that only costs US$90. When tested and compared with the more expensive device, the MacGyvered one performed just as accurately. The imaging device stands at 5.6 centimeters (2.2 in) and only weighs 25 grams (less than 1 oz), making it much more portable to areas with less medical access.

8 Kanzius RF Therapy

John Kanzius was not a doctor. He was a broadcast engineer from Erie, Pennsylvania who operated a series of FM radio stations across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas. In 2003, shortly after retirement, he was given some of the worst news anyone can hear—he had cancer. During chemo sessions, he noticed that children who also suffered from cancer lost their hair, their smiles, and their overall energy. This depressing sight gave Kanzius an idea.

Knowing little about medicine but much about physics and engineering, he studied the physical mechanics of chemotherapy. He suggested that treating cancer with radio waves—the same waves radio stations use to communicate—could have less harmful effects than radiation therapy. To prove this, he devised a treatment called Kanzius RF Therapy, which uses a device he made from spare parts from his old radio stations.

The device emits radio waves that remove cancer cells without killing the healthier cells in the body, which is a common problem associated with the standard chemo. During laboratory trials, Kanzius RF Therapy was 100 percent effective in removing cancer cells with no harmful side effects. While Kanzius has sadly succumbed to cancer, many doctors are still investigating the potential of the Kanzius RF Therapy and its place in the future of cancer treatment.

7 Acne Medicine For Schizophrenia

For teenagers, there is no greater enemy than the acne. At an age when you desperately want to look attractive, biology interferes and gives you nasty, red marks on your face. Thankfully, there is an array of medication that can be used to treat acne. One of them is minocycline, an antibiotic prescribed for many types of infections and also commonly used for moderate to severe acne problems. For less than US$1 per tablet, teens can easily get rid of their acne and spend more time on their poetry or goth music.

You might think that a medicine for acne wouldn’t go very far. That’s probably what doctors from Japan thought when they prescribed minocycline to schizophrenic patients who had minor infections and unexpectedly found that the drug also alleviated psychotic symptoms in the patients. The drug even showed to be more effective than haloperidol, a strong and expensive anti-psychotic drug. Today, psychiatrists around the world are testing the effectiveness of minocycline for treating schizophrenia across larger populations. The results are promising and have great potential for establishing a cheaper, easier, and better treatment for schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

6 Baby Incubators Made From Car Parts

The principle behind neonatal incubation is simple—newborns, specifically those who are born preterm or with special conditions, need to be kept warm to sustain their lives. However, many hospitals, especially in poor areas, fall short of this simple procedure because they don’t have enough incubators. This results in thousands of babies dying each year from incubator shortage. In Kenya, around 53,000 preterm babies die annually because of a limited number of incubators.

Seeing that number go down is the goal of Massachusetts-based firm Design That Matters. Noticing that cars are more common a technology than incubators, their team decided to create prototypes of fully-functional incubators using discarded car parts. Headlights to provide warmth, dashboard fans for air circulation, and signal lights for incubator alarms are just a few of the features of their cheap incubator design. Since car parts are very common even in developing areas, producing and maintaining these lifesaving devices would be easier and more affordable. Though still on its prototype stages, the car-parts incubator shows a promising future in neonatal care.

5 The Cancer Breathalyzer

Diagnosing cancer is a complicated matter. It is also quite expensive. The median cost of a biopsy is US$5,000 while PET scans range from $850–$4,000. As if having cancer weren’t devastating enough, it also takes a painful toll on the patient’s pockets.

Scientists from Georgia Tech Research Institute have attempted to reduce the expense of diagnosis by developing a device that will detect cancer using a very simple technology—a breathalyzer. The device captures a breath sample from the patient in a container, which is then analyzed for breath volatile organic compounds that are associated with the presence of cancer. In a laboratory trial, the device detected cancer in affected patients 80 percent of the time, making it a potentially viable supplement to our current diagnostic techniques. At US$100 a piece, more indigent patients could have better access to proper diagnosis with the use of this technology.

4 Light For Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory disease that targets the central nervous system and includes such debilitating symptoms as paralysis and loss of vision. With 2.5 million sufferers worldwide and 200 new diagnoses every week, MS is becoming a bigger challenge to both specialists and patients. While there are a few expensive ways to manage the symptoms of MS, there is currently no cure for the condition. However, scientists believe they have harnessed a force in which a cure may lie—the power of light.

In an exciting discovery headed by Jeri-Anne Lyons and Janis Eells of the University of Wisconsin, early MS symptoms of lab rats were significantly reduced after a period of exposure to a particular wavelength of light called near-infrared. Because near-infrared light is already commonly used in hospitals for other purposes, the researchers are hopeful that further developments in this effective and inexpensive treatment to MS will be available in the future.

3 The Cardboard MRI

The fact that we can take “pictures” of the insides of our bodies is an astounding feat of medicine. Various medical imaging techniques have given us the ability to learn about our bodies with greater precision than ever before. The most popular one, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has been used over the years to diagnose cancer and many other types of illnesses. However, MRI scans don’t come cheap. The cost of an MRI scan can go up to USD $7,000 depending on which part of your body you need imaged. Additionally, the functions of a standard MRI scanner are limited—lung physiology, for instance, isn’t captured very accurately by the technology.

To address this problem, two Harvard physicists, Matthew Rosen and Ronald Walsworth, have built their own MRI imager that can clearly illuminate our lungs using typical items found in any hardware store. In their improvised imager, a magnetic field is generated by two coils mounted on two metal trellises while wire grids and rings redirect this magnetic field towards the patient. The patient is asked to inhale and suspend a lungful of polarized helium and air for 30 seconds while wearing an antenna made of a rubber-coated cardboard tube wrapped with a coil of wire. With the aid of the magnetic field, the antenna picks up the magnetic spin of the polarized helium, displaying an accurate picture of the gas flow and oxygen absorption of the lungs.

A standard MRI scanner displays protons in water molecules. The problem with this is that the protons inside the body need to be aligned by a very powerful magnet. In Rosen and Walsworth’s cardboard MRI, the helium inhaled by the patient is pre-aligned, allowing the scanner to use a magnet 150 times weaker than that of a conventional MRI. Because holding one’s breath may be difficult for people with lung disorders, the researchers are developing their system to capture the lungs in a shorter period of time. Though the machine has not yet been tested in clinical trials, the success of the prototype hints to a future of more accessible imaging technology.

2 Container Hospitals

With only two doctors per 1,000 people and more than 20 million people living with HIV, Africa is desperate for better access to healthcare, but hospitals don’t just sprout from the ground. A typical three-story hospital that would be considered rather small by American standards costs $17 million to build. Add medical supplies and staffing to the total and you have an insurmountable problem for these impoverished regions.

To solve this crisis, the Chinese government offers an amusing plan. China’s Ministry of Science and Technology developed a system of large containers that can be slotted together like toy blocks to form a fully functional hospital. Each container serves different functions found in a standard hospital, such as clinics and waiting areas for patients. The containers are portable and can easily be brought to areas that are short of medical facilities.

This ingenious idea is not without its challenges, such as the constant stream of electricity and water supply required to power the container hospitals, something that many African countries also lack. However, it is a first step to improving the quality of healthcare in Africa. The first container hospitals will be deployed to Cameroon and Namibia and the Chinese government hopes to give more to other African countries in the near future.

1 Slug Glue

We’ve been stitching wounds since the time of ancient Egypt, but little development has been made in sutures aside from proper sanitation and the materials used since then. While this age-old technique has proven itself useful over the centuries, it comes with plenty of hassles. Sutures are painful, time-consuming, and really expensive. Stitches can cost a patient up to US$500 for a single wound.

How can a primitive procedure be so pricey? Biologists from Ithaca College do not know. What they do know is that there is a potentially cheaper alternative that may be more effective than surgical sutures. In search for a naturally occurring substance that can bind wounds easily, they turned to a bizarre solution—slug slime.

Slugs, the bane of every gardener, produces gel that helps them move around with ease. Their slime sticks to wet surfaces and is also compliant to flexing and bending. These conditions make this unique substance a perfect alternative to medical stitches. While dermal adhesives already exist, this type of wound-binding procedure is barely used because they aren’t very resistant to bodily fluid. With slug slime’s ability to stick to wet surfaces, wounds can now be put back together with ease without the risk of leakage of bodily fluids that commonly results from both stitches and adhesives.

Unlike previous methods, slug glue can potentially be used in any kind of wound—straight or jagged, deep or shallow—without the risk of leakage. Because it can survive many harsh conditions, the researcher calls this glue an “ideal medical adhesive.” The best thing about slug glue is that slugs are hermaphrodites, with some laying up to 500 eggs per year. While an abundance of slugs and their goo might not cheer most people, it means this future advancement to wound treatment will be more available to people.

Asher B is currently in grad school to become a cognitive psychologist. In his spare time, he watches lots of sitcoms and eats lots of ramen. You can send him an email here or follow him on Twitter.

These days, “Artists” live for innovation (historically they lived for transcendent beauty). Art is a creative act and artists have always been creative in how they use materials to create their art. Some of these materials can strike us as unusual, even when they become traditional. For hundreds of years artists that work in tempera use egg yolks to bind pigment in their painting.

Here are ten materials used in new, exciting, and sometimes disgusting ways by so-called artists. Be careful which ones you try at home

10 Crazy Things That Make Us Love Or Hate Art

10 Blood

If you are looking for a red paint you might think that blood would make a cheap alternative. Unfortunately blood dries to a dark brown colour. One modern artist, Vincent Castiglia, works exclusively with human blood to create his nightmarish visions. Perhaps the most famous use of blood in art was when Marc Quinn sculpted his own head out of his own frozen blood. Called ‘Self’ it takes 10 pints of blood to create each bust. Every five years he crafts a new one to show his ageing process.

There were reports in 2002 that the bust had melted after being stored in a freezer that was unplugged by builders working on art collector Charles Saatchi’s home. This is unlikely however because the artwork travels with its own refrigeration unit. Part of the meaning of the piece is dependency – if the freezer ever breaks then the art melts. Marc Quinn is fairly relaxed about what happens after his death. One thing is sure, with no more Marc there’ll be no more blood and these portraits will become a lot more valuable.^[1]

9 Toast

While some media used in art, like marble and bronze, are meant to last through the ages there are those who prefer their art to have a more ephemeral lifetime. One artist, Lennie Payne, was inspired by the artistic potential of toast when they cut smiling faces out of toast for their child. Payne uses a blowtorch to scorch bread black and then scrapes away at it to create the right pigment. Using a number of slices he creates portraits of famous people as a meditation on how quickly fame fades. Some of the portraits he creates in bread that will eventually go mouldy will barely outlive the fame of their subject.

To help his artwork survive a little longer Payne has experimented with soaking the toast in resin and painting them with varnish. This has not always been done in time and he once lost several slices of a portrait to the nibbling teeth of mice. Everyone’s a critic…^[2]

8 Fruit

The beauty of photography is that it can capture a moment and make it last forever. When you seductively finger fruit you no longer have to worry about the image being lost. For Stephanie Sarley her videos and photos have brought her fame and infamy – and brought her up against Instagram’s rules about sexually suggestive content.

But then challenging society’s standards is part of the point of the work. Some see Instagram and other social media company’s rules as being illogical. Why is a man’s nipple okay to see but a woman’s worth banning? If you photoshopped a man’s nipple over a woman’s would that be okay? By pushing her fingers into juicy fruit Sarley is pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable.^[3]

7 Cheese

Some people just love to smother their food with cheese. Who can blame them, it is pretty delicious. But does melting cheese all over everything make pretty art? Yes, according to Cosimo Cavalerro. Inspired by a time when he accidentally dripped some cheese on his chair Cavalerro has put cheese on everything from sheds, to entire hotel rooms, to dresses. Once applied he takes photos of the cheesy messes to immortalise them.

He has branched out into other media, as when he made a controversial statue of Jesus out of chocolate, but cheese is where his heart is. In 2019 to protest the building of a wall along the Mexican-US border Cavalerro constructed his own out of cheese nearby to show how absurd the wall was. “It sounds cheesy,” he remarked, “but just love one another.”^[4]

6 Ants

What would you do if you had 200,000 ants on your hands? Probably call an exterminator, but artist Chris Trueman decided that that was exactly what he needed to create his masterpiece. Ordering ants in batches of up to 40,000 at a time he would kill them and individually position them with tweezers to make the image he had in mind. When he was done his artwork “Self portrait with a gun” was put on sale for $35,000.

The ants would be killed by exposing them to nail polish remover but eventually even this relatively human death began to bother the artist. “It took several years, not because of the actual labour, but because at one point I started to feel bad about killing all of the ants and I stopped the project for over a year. Then I decided that the first ants would have died in vain if I didn’t finish the work so I decided to continue.” It is believed that the piece ended up being sold to Ripley’s Believe It or Not.^[5]

10 Tragic Cases Of Life Imitating Art

5 Fish heads

We tend to discourage children from playing with their food but we might be denying them a potentially lucrative source of income. For artist Anne-Catherine Becker-Echivard playing with food is at the centre of her work. Taking fish heads she crafts little scenes to place them in as if they were humans.

Her desire to play with animals, both living and dead, began in childhood when she would transfer her doll’s clothes to her pet rats. It was only when she started to train in the fish industry though that she discovered her love of severed fish heads. Her creations may not be everyone’s idea of high art but they make you smile and make you think. As the artist says:

“Take the fishes in my factories for an example, they are in uniforms. They are asexual and give a global message. That is neither the condition of women nor the condition of men. That is man, the human being, in general. The factories represent a state of conformity to the man, to the common citizen as there is so much work in the production line, ‘the modern times’. The dehumanization.”

Can fish be art? You’ll just have to mullet over for yourself.^[6]

4 Pencils

Artists have been using pencils for art for hundreds of years, so this entry surely isn’t that weird. But it is the way some modern artists are using their pencils that is strange. Instead of just drawing with them they are turning the pencils themselves into art. While some are attaching pencils together to construct large artworks others are cutting into the graphite core of the pencil to sculpt miniature masterpieces.

Salavat Fidai is just one artist making use of his very steady hands to work on a tiny scale. Using a very sharp blade to carve out the soft and brittle centre of pencils Fidai has recreated everything from world landmarks, to Game of Thrones swords, to astronauts. While the artist needs a steady hand to make them his viewers need good eyes to see them. Some of his works are less than 0.5 mm across.^[7]

3 Pennies

The face of Abraham Lincoln is one of the most recognisable in the United States. Featured on the 1 cent coin he appears in almost every handful of change. Those images of him are tiny however and Richard Schlatter decided he wanted to make a big one. Using over 24,000 pennies he created an image of Lincoln 12 feet high and 8 feet across.

Schlatter was inspired when he was counting out some pennies and noticed how they each varied in colour. Because of the difference in how they are handled pennies can appear as brilliant shiny copper or almost black, and all the hues in between. Schlatter decided to use these variations to create a portrait of Lincoln. Each year that Lincoln has been on the penny, from 1909 to 2017, was represented in at least one coin.

Overall it was not a bad outlay on the part of the artist. Using pennies worth around $245 he walked away with an art prize of $200,000.^[8]

2 Copper sulfate

In 2006 the artist Roger Hiorns took advantage of some high school chemistry to create some extraordinary art. Many students will be familiar with copper sulfate from a simple experiment where a blue crystal is dangled in a saturated solution of copper sulfate and the crystal is seen to grow over time. Hiorns took this crystal growth and applied it to a BMW engine – the copper sulfate crystals converting the metal into a glistening mass of deep blue jewels.

This was not large enough for Hiorns however. For his next work with copper sulfate he took an entire British apartment and flooded it with 90,000 litres of copper sulfate solution. Left to react for a month the artist returned and pumped the mixture out to reveal a home transformed into a cavernous blue geode. When the artwork was donated to a charity it took a great deal of effort to cut the whole apartment from its building without destroying either the art, or the neighbour’s homes.^[9]

1 Poop

There are many people with strong feelings about the effect of Facebook on society and democracy. Few people are willing to go as far as expressing their views via the medium of their own poop. Thankfully for art history KATSU, a graffiti artist, was willing to step up to the plate, or the toilet.

Using his own faeces KATSU created a more than passable likeness of Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook’s founder. KATSU apparently does not mind getting his hands dirty, though when painting with his poop he does admit to using many gloves and a face mask. But sometimes the medium an artist chooses perfectly captures their feelings towards their subject matter.

“Mark is Mark.” KATSU said. “He’s this mutation, this gross aspiration everyone idolizes… He deserves to be ridiculed… I want to let people know my beliefs.” With KATSU creating a series of poop portraits of the titans of Silicon Valley I think his beliefs are pretty clear, if not always pretty.^[10]

10 Fascinating Old-Timey Art Trends

Even though it’s been going on two centuries since Robert Cornelius took both the first photographic portrait and first selfie in 1839, the practically obsolete art of capturing likenesses through other mediums has not died out. Plenty of people continue to have portraits painted of themselves even though it’s common for that to cost $15,000. Many even pay to make fun of themselves through a caricature artist.

It’s not enough to just have a technically perfect recreation. We feel the need to be filtered through a perspective, and that can be determined both through technique and medium. While there are many acclaimed examples of portraits created with very bizarre technique out there, such as many by Picasso, portraits made in highly unusual mediums can be very compelling as well. Unfortunately using a unique medium for a portrait will often be dismissed as a mere gimmick, even if there is a cogent artistic intent behind it. TopTenz will let you be the judge in the next 10 cases…

10. Butter Sculpting

The history of making elaborate sculptures in such a fleeting medium as butter dates back to at least 1876, when an autodidact from Arkansas named Caroline Brooks made a bas relief of Iolanthe, the heroine of the Henrik Hertz play King Rene’s Daughter. That sculpture, which needed to be constantly kept over a pail of ice, would bring spectators from around the nation that would pay 25 cents apiece to look at it, and was featured in The New York Times. To think the only reason she’d started butter sculpting in the first place was to market the butter she was churning herself.

These days the most prominent butter sculptor is arguably Sarah Pratt, who became known for carving 600-pound sculptures of cows. The process of sculpting takes 10 or so days of sitting in large 40 degree refrigerators, and according to her it’s a very stinky process as her material inevitably starts to spoil. For special orders, she’s also done Neil Armstrong and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Despite everything, she claims that her sculpting work has not killed her taste for butter.  

9. Vat19’s Lincoln Portrait

On November 17, 2016 the hosts of Vat19, a YouTube channel in St. Louis, Missouri, posted their making-of video for their portrait of the Great Emancipator. They took his most common likeness, and through carefully dipping some of them in salt and vinegar solution, assembled both tarnished and pristine pennies into a 9-foot tall, 6-foot wide image of the 16th Commander-in-Chief. It ended up taking $143.88 worth of pennies glued to roughly 99 sheets of 8.5-by-11 inch paper.

The portrait became so popular that Vat19 began selling kits to help their fans create their own miniature versions. For $19.99, plus the $8.46 in pennies that the customers had to provide themselves, they could have their own 18-by-24 inch mosaic. Some might consider that a bit mercantile, but what else could be expected of people who make art out of literal money?

8. Marijuana Portrait

You have to hand it to Snoop Dogg. Despite very stiff competition (or should we say spliff competition?), he has managed to become the go-to celebrity reference point for smoking marijuana.  This certainly did not escape the notice of Jason Mecier. In 2011, he took authentic cannabis, edibles, pills, and partially burned roaches, and made the only portrait on this list that it’s potentially a federal crime in the United States to own. Perhaps it should be called a pot-trait. Mecier estimated that he spent about $1,500 in drug paraphernalia to create it.    

Since then, Jason Mecier has become one of the leading figures in the field of portrait art through novelty mediums. He’s been dubbed the “Macaroni Monet” for caricatures that range from a work of Miley Cyrus made of candy to one of David Bowie made of feathers and cosmetics. But this list is meant to share the work of multiple artists, so the last we’ll have to say about Mecier is that if you’d like to see more of his work, check out his book Pop Trash.  

7. Crayon Pointillism

Hearing that a portrait was done in crayon gives the impression that the most appropriate place to display it is on the fridge of the artist’s parents. However Granville, Ohio artist Christian Faur’s approach was truly one of a kind. Inspired by the sight of his child opening a box of 120 crayons, he took hundreds of wax crayons and lined them up inside boxes with a glass side so that the tips would effectively act as pixels as on a television or computer screen.

His one-of-a-kind approach to pointillism actually ended up achieving a level of national fame, including being featured in art shows at such places as the Indianapolis Art Center, and featured in publications that included Wired magazine. Some of his projects, like his Forgotten Children series, require tens of thousands of crayons or, in some cases, crayon tips. Sometimes he’s able to achieve a near-photorealistic look with his images. Occasionally he adds a little flair of intentionally putting strips of the wrong color crayons in there, as if he’s trying to represent static or some other form of signal degradation. It’s little deliberate flaws like that which turn Faur’s work from just a technical process into something with a more personal flair.  

6. Book Page Sculptures

As far as tributes to an author go, cutting the pages of a book so that the edges of the pages serve as the contours of an author’s face feels like one of the more elegant. In 2006, Nicholas Galanin, an Alaskan artist who worked in mediums that varied from sidewalk chalk to jewelry, took his copy of the thousand page book Under Mount Saint Elias and sliced a 3D face out of it.

In 2012 the Dutch publishers Markus Ravenhorst and Maarten Reynen repeated the idea when they had artist Fedde Souverein design a series of biographies and autobiographies with pages shaped like the faces of their authors. The series included Anne Frank and Vincent van Gogh. While these portraits are much more polished, the fact the text in the Dutch books was shrunk to fit better in the margins for easier reading makes them feel much less authentic than Galanin’s sculpture.  

5. Man of the Soil

In 2018, Texas US House representative Beto O’Rourke created a lot of excitement and a lot of disappointment when he came within two points of beating Ted Cruz in the race for the US Senate. When he announced a run for president in 2019, much of his voter base’s enthusiasm was still high. One artist who wanted to make his support for the candidate known was Kansas artist Stan Herd. He serendipitously unveiled his two acre soil portrait outside Austin, Texas of O’Rourke just in time for O’Rourke to announce his presidential candidacy.

Herd’s portrait is composed of soil and grass from Kansas along with larger rocks and gravel. It took him two weeks to complete. It also was hardly unprecedented for him. He’d done a similar work for the Minneapolis Art Institute where he recreated Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees. In 2008 he also made a soil portrait of Barack Obama during the 2008 primary election, though on a much smaller scale that time.   

4. Etch a Portrait

There are few widely-used ways to create an image less user-friendly that the Etch-a-Sketch. There are the very simple but delicate knobs for moving along the X and Y axis that render even making a simple curve somewhat difficult. And then there is the inability to fix mistakes with any precision (without starting over), the need to conceive the drawing so that all lines are connected, and so on. It’s a wonder that Kyle Fleming can render images that are comprehensible at all, let alone create uncanny portraits. But then, he’s had 13 years of practice.  

Fleming’s subjects haven’t been limited to cartoon characters like Super Mario or Philip J. Fry from Futurama. He’s also tackled Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, Che Guevara, Leonard Nimoy, and will be unveiling his Albert Einstein at toy fairs from London to Tokyo in 2020 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Etch-a-Sketch. But don’t worry, thinking that a severe earthquake will be enough to erase his entire oeuvre: Fleming removes the sand inside and locks the dials every time he finishes a new etching, leaving them permanent. So if you decide to request one of the portraits he generously offers through his Instagram account, your portrait can be among illustrious company for years and years.  

3. Portraits in Soldiers

During World War I, the American public needed to be sold on supporting the Allies in a war in Europe that even many Allied soldiers no longer thought was worth it. Some truly inspired propaganda was needed. Arthur Mole and John D. Thomas took tens of thousands of soldiers at places such as Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio and created tableaus of a type that simply wouldn’t be made today in this age of CGI.

The soldiers lined up in formations to resemble symbols of classic Americana, including the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, and an American flag. The most detailed image was a portrait of President Woodrow Wilson. The groups of service members could stretch for as long as half a mile, naturally meaning that the vast majority of the soldiers had to stand far away to maintain the desired proportions for the 2D objects, a technique also known as “forced perspective.” For example there are about 15 soldiers in the row nearest the camera in the Statue of Liberty photograph, but there are roughly 12,000 standing in for the statue’s torch and looking significantly smaller than the nearer 15. The photographs were so successful that Mole and Thomas spent six years making them, about 30 of which survive today.   

2. Blood

Comedian Margaret Cho and rocker Gregg Allman don’t seem like they’d have much in common, but they are, in one sense, linked by blood. By that we mean that they both hired Vincent Castiglia to take some of their blood and paint their portraits. In Cho’s case, her 3-by-2 foot painting was the first time that Castiglia used blood other than his own. In Allman’s case, the portrait wasn’t completed until after his death and his children contributed some of their blood to the project as well. Copies of the portrait were included with his posthumous album Southern Blood.

Castiglia began painting in the medium of blood around 2000. Since then he’s developed a habit of having around 15 vials of his blood in his studio, which he claims is less than most people would presume. In 2008, during preparation for an exhibition of his work at HG Giger’s museum, he almost collapsed one of his lungs from extracting too much. That’s just one of the many memorable incidents recounted in the 2018 documentary about him, Bloodlines.

1. CEO Feces Series

In January 2015, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s likeness was captured by artist Katsu in the medium of his own feces on a canvas. Katsu had previously done a series of images where he photoshopped a black eye on Zuckerberg, inspired to do so by the film The Social Network. To create the material for the work, Katsu ate a lot of Thai food. He wore a breathing mask and changed his latex gloves numerous times while working. He also made no effort to preserve the painting, leaving the image to crumble and flake off. If someone bought it (and Katsu claimed at least one anonymous potential client reached out to him) then it would be money that literally went to waste.

It turns out, Katsu  In May 2015, he released another fecal portrait, this time of Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Both paintings were presented with an LED light canvas, so at least they were a little classy.

Dustin Koski is also the author of A Tale of Magic Gone Wrong, a story about fairies turning into monsters.