UK-based artist Leigh Mulley is best known for her amazingly realistic paintings of cool stuff, like lollipops, plastic water guns and ice cream trucks, but this portrait work of art really caught our eye. The art was created specifically for an empty windows initiative in the artist’s home town of Folkestone. When asked to work on the theme of “Hidden Gems”, Mulley thought of the characters that make up the town’s community, and decided to make a portrait of the guys who run the local tattoo shop – one of the longest running businesses on the street. Mulley photographed the business owners and then used a computer software program to enhance the pixels to more closely resemble the used tattoo ink cups that would comprise the portrait work. The final portrait measures 4m x 3m (approximately 13 x 10 feet) and required a total of 13,064 empty cups – each of which were hand painted, one by one, to match the original photo. The cups were bonded to 8 large panels that were reconstructed on site in the Folkestone Town centre on the Kent coast.
