Portraits Made From Wine Corks

Finally! A purpose for all those used wine bottle corks – and yes, there can be many, just ask artist Scott Gundersen – he has an entire studio full of used wine corks that are stacked one on top of another according to colour. After noticing that used wine corks have varying colours on the ends that were stuck inside a bottle of wine, Gundersen developed a way to create incredible large-format portraits based on the impressionist concept of pointillism – the idea that when many singular dots of various colours are collected together and viewed from a distance, they translate into a visually recognizable image. Gundersen takes a photograph of his subjects, then spends time mapping out the shading and proportions of the image in order to translate the photograph into a work of art.

He uses the light and dark corks as tones to help create an image that looks very three-dimensional. This particular image is of a woman named Grace, and this 96 by 66 inch work of art took the artist a total of 50 hours, and a total of 9,217 corks.