Amazingly tiny sculptures

I collected the best tiny sculptures from the best sculptors arround the web:

Willard Wigan:

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

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.”