Croatian artist Dino Tomic usually works with conventional materials like pencils and paper, but his latest project has him spreading kitchen salt on a black background to create insanely detailed portraits and Indian mandalas.

The Norway-based salt wizard, who works as an art teacher and tattoo artist, starts off with a large black canvas and uses a plastic bottle or a paper cone to painstakingly squeeze out the grainy mineral until he completes his mindblowing masterpieces. Believe it or not, Tomic just recently started working with salt, as a way of keeping busy while relaxing his wrist, which had started to hurt from too much hand-drawing.

“My wrist was hurting from so much drawing so I needed to take a break,” the young artist told Buzzfeed. “I started with salt three weeks ago just to relax my wrist, because I only use my shoulder.” Looking at how detailed his creations are, you would think he has been doing this kind of work all his life. However, Tomic says working with salt is very similar to airbrushing, which he had some experience with, so drawing with the basic food ingredient really wasn’t very hard to get into.

That doesn’t mean creating such detailed works of art with salt is an easy job. One of his latest designs, a giant Indian Mandala, reportedly took him 25 hours to complete, over a period of three days. Knowing just how much time and patience goes into each one of these beautiful salt paintings makes watching Tomic casually destroying them in just a few seconds after they’re done even more painful.

Ever since he started working with salt, and especially after posting a couple of portraits of characters from the uber-popular Game of Thrones TV series, Dino Tomic’s Instagram profile simply blew up. His new art form has been picked up and featured by dozens of high-profile design websites and blogs, and his follower count is constantly growing. Somehow I doubt he’ll forget all about salt art it when his wrist pain goes away.

Dino Tomic is not the only artist working with salt – a few years ago we featured the works of Bashir Sultani – but he is definitely one of the best.

Photos: Dino Tomic/Instagram