Using a hair plucked from a dead housefly as his paintbrush, self-taught sculptor Willard Wigan brings an extremely sharp eye to his life's work: creating miniature masterpieces that fit inside a needle's eye or sit atop the head of a pin.

The British artist reduces pop culture characters like the Incredible Hulk and The Simpsons to tiny figures that fetch big prices: Microsculptures go for up to $140,000 a pop, according to Wigan's current catalog. Collectors, including Prince Charles, Elton John, Mike Tyson and British tycoon David Lloyd, receive a microscope along with each nanoscale object so they can actually see the artwork they've purchased.

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"I'm like a mad professor, but without the spiky hair," laughs Wigan, 52, who spends about six weeks on each piece. "I get down to 6, 7 microns, which is one-third the size of a period you'd see in a newspaper."

How does he do it? Wigan peers through a microscope at 800 times magnification as he molds dust fibers and slivers of plastic into recognizable shapes.

Exercising precision control over unruly materials requires nearly superhuman calm, Wigan told Wired.com during his recent visit to Los Angeles, where some of his creations are on display. The artwork is housed in special cases that incorporate microscope lenses focused on the work to allow visitors to get a good look.

"When you work at a microscopic level," he says, "you have to control every part of your body movement — your fingertips, your joints, the pulse in your fingers. I slow down my breathing before any cut, which gives me one and a half seconds in between the heartbeat to make my incisions."

Anatomy of a Microsculpture

For his tribute to Buzz Aldrin's 1969 moon landing, pictured above, Wigan manipulated the astronaut's arm into saluting position with a minute implement made from the sliver of a plastic shirt tag.

"I cut the joints of this nylon fiber and moved the arm toward its head, but as I bend it, the arm keeps wanting to spring back," he says, describing the delicate process. "I'm making little grooves, and as I'm cutting, the body starts to bend and twist and by then, perspiration starts dripping off my finger down the tool and toward the sculpture, like a little tidal wave of sweat coming down."

Setting the teeny astronaut figure firmly in place presented another problem. "I drilled two microscopic holes into the needle, then pushed his feet inside the little holes," Wigan says. "If you press too hard, the body will flick like a little catapult, so I had to let my pulse act like a jackhammer to apply the pressure that actually shoved him into place."

As for the flag, Wigan used a housefly hair to paint a miniscule plastic bag fragment with crushed paint pigment, then literally grabbed his flagpole out of thin air.

"I got a piece of black plastic, waved it in the air and collected a dust fiber particle," he says. "I put it underneath the microscope, grabbed one end and straightened it out. That became the flagpole."

Wigan began making small stuff at age 5, when he built houses for ants. Snubbed at school for being dyslexic, he found refuge in an alternate universe of his own design constructed in the backyard of his parents' cottage in Birmingham, England.

"I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live," he says. "I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to where my teachers couldn't criticize me. That's how my career as a microsculptor began."

This Wizard of Oz

As an adult, Wigan worked for two decades in a factory until he won overnight acclaim in 1999. To commemorate the royal wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones, he carved "Edward and Sophie: The Perfect Match" on the end of a matchstick.

Wigan's Puff Daddy sculpture flashes some bling. Images courtesy Willard Wigan

The stunt made Wigan's reputation. Since then, he's crafted dozens of cultural figures, real and fictional, working out of a wardrobe closet lit with fiber-optic LEDs.

Wigan's smallest triumph to date came in the form of a commission from a British tycoon who wanted an art piece invisible to the naked eye. "I crushed a grain of sand with a little hammer," Wigan matter-of-factly recalls, "smashed it into dust, took one of those dust particles and made a sculpture of a little polar bear out of it."

Miniaturist to the Stars

Next up for Wigan: He's moving from England to Los Angeles, where he plans to launch a miniaturized celebrity series, starting with Michael Jackson.

Might this one-time outcast become the toast of Hollywood? The optimistic Wigan expects nothing less.

"I'm just honoring my mother's words," he says. "She always told me, 'The smaller your work, the bigger your name will become.'"

Wigan's miniature sculptures will be on display at Los Angeles' Hollywood Education and Literacy Project, 6336 Hollywood Blvd., through Aug. 24.

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