9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials

9 Mind-Blowing Pieces of Art Made With Ridiculous Materials 

we've all tried to build a house of cards or make a sand castle at some point in our lives, but most of us get bored within a few minutes and give up. For others it may take an hour, or maybe even a few days... and there are those who devote their lives to making hugely pointless yet amazing things out of small, ridiculous materials.

 It's no surprise that people can build some amazing things out of Legos. We're pretty sure all those replicas of important buildings they have in their theme parks will come in pretty handy when evolution inevitably turns us all into smurfs.

Let's face it, toothpicks are a technology that became useless the moment dental floss was invented. Nobody knows why we continue manufacturing them; their only purpose right now is to aid people who don't want to touch canapes with their hands and don't know how to use a napki

You've probably burned a lot of toast in your life, since dependable toaster technology has not advanced one iota since the device was invented. Depending on how much bread you had left, how hungry you were or how little time you had, your response was probably somewhere between "Oh, that sucks" and Samuel L. Jackson's monologue from Snakes on a Plane (only with toasts and toasters instead of snakes and planes). We're gonna go ahead and guess that you never pulled out the burnt piece of toast and framed it on a wall, though -- and that's where you've been going wrong in life, it seems. Yes, people pay real money to look at toast art.

Ryan Alexiev (born to Bulgarian immigrants, raised in Alaska and educated at UC Berkley, which is pretty much the definition of "confused hippie") finds his inspiration in children's cereal. Using the most colorful and sugary pieces he can find, he creates light hearted, whimsical portraits like -- no, wait, he makes shit like this:

When we say "matchstick heads," we don't mean the upper part of the matchstick -- we mean something a little more literal, makes sculptures out of stuff like coat hangers, car tires and old newspapers. Also matchsticks. Thousands and thousands of little matchsticks. Mach uses around 30,000 matches in each of his limited-edition sculptures, and then sells them for about the same amount of money.

Definitely the grossest entry on this list. Turns out there are a baffling amount of artists out there who look at old, soggy, stinky cigarette butts and see the building blocks of a fabulous sculpture. Like the dude who made this giant cigarette butt shell:

So you're hosting a fancy dinner, but then you realize you forgot to own a mantelpiece. What could you possibly use to cover your dinner table while making it look classy? Hannah Mendelsohn found the perfect alternative: ridiculous amounts of M&M's.

The one problem with having a bitchin' M&M's coffee table is that suddenly the rest of your furniture will look pretty lame in comparison. And, sadly, you can't cover a chair with chocolate candy (as we've all found out at some point in our lives). Well, that's what drinking straws are for, it turns out:

If you were a child in the 1980s you probably had a Lite-Brite. You know, that glowing box with colored pegs you could stick in little holes (or alternatively put in your mouth and choke on, which was way more fun). If you did, you might have tried to make your mom and dad a nice picture, only to have it come off like a disfigured, utterly disappointing mess.