In our modern world, we don’t really get to use our imagination much since we keep automating stuff that we used to do ourselves. It’s quite interesting how things change with the technology, and what we did yesterday with our bare hands, we’ve found a better way of doing today. Even artists seem to automate processes in order to switch it up a little. Some artists used to use their brushes to create their art, but nowadays, their automated painting robot creates art that is way more popular than their art used to be when they did it themselves. Isn’t that weird? Where do you think it will end? With the development of artificial intelligence, there is no telling where we might end up, but I think it’s safe to say that we’ll be seeing a lot of different ways to automate things in the future.

Someone who doesn’t use automated processes to create stunning art is Mary Ellen Croteau. She is a brilliant artist who recently turned to the bottle cap in order to switch things up a little. She usually doesn’t use bottle caps for her art, but she stumbled over the approach when she was creating another piece of art, and she just couldn’t stop collecting and recycling bottle caps.

Before she knew it, she was creating a self portrait out of bottle caps. The process was of course long, but the result is nothing less then ultimately impressive. If you take a good look at the pictures, it can appear that there is something helping the portrait look as good as it does, but she assures us that the only places when she has used any color is where shadows were obscured by the white board in between the caps which she had to blacken with a marker. Other than that, it’s only bottle caps that are nested inside each other in order to give it the right color blend. The more I look at it, the more amazing it becomes. Imagine how many bottle caps it took to create this. Would you have the patience to do it?