After two years and the help of nearly ten thousand screws, Andrew Myres, has finally completed his work. You might think he was doing some home renovations, but that’s not the case. Andrew used them to create amazing 3D portraits.

He creates distinctively unique and realistic portraits by combining oil paint and the right use of shadows. You might think he has a screw loose, but Andrew says he first came up with the idea while working at a church.

“I was doing bronze reliefs depicting the life of Saint Catherine and thought how cool would it be to create something entirely out of screws. I’d always wanted to work with screws; I got the idea and that was it. Six months later I completed my first piece.”

To create the portraits, some of which are over a meter tall, Andrew spends weeks drilling holes into a piece of wood. He then drills in the screws and checks their positions before painstakingly painting each one by hand. He would often work from a photograph, but also preferred to meet the subject in person first to make sure he got their facial features just right.

Each portrait is constructed from between 8,000 to 10,000 screws and can take up to four months to complete. The prices of these screw portraits don’t come cheap, the small ones sell for $9,000 each and the big ones are set to be sold at up to $35,000 each. It may sound like Andrew struck gold with his work, but the artist actually says the portraits are not big earners.

”Household screws are cheap if you need to hang a few pictures; but when you need to buy tens of thousands of them, the price can add up quickly.”

For Andrew it’s a labour of love. To view more of his works, visit his website.

Source: http://mymodernmet.com/thousands-of-screws-make-a-3d/