An artist has made incredible portraits of celebs out of old JEANS – from Marilyn Monroe to David Bowie Cristiam Ramos is passionate about creating unique art pieces and has adopted denim as his quirky signature material.
The 43-year-old has also dabbled with other items including butterflies, toilet rolls, toothpaste, and sweets to make his unique creations.
But his incredible jeans artwork features the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Davie Bowie and Brooke Shields.
“Each piece takes me around three to four weeks, working for more than eight hours a day, it’s a very complicated job,” Cristiam, from Orlando, Florida, told NeedToKnow.co.uk.
“Each piece has over 20,000 little pieces of blue jeans, and have used more than 80 pairs throughout my collection.
“Jeans are part of our daily life, regardless of social class, they represent rebellion, sensuality, freedom and joy and that’s what I want to convey with these pieces.
“I came up with making a collection made from jeans as I was inspired by two things; cinema and fashion.
“I have always believed that these two artistic expressions are very important in society, for example cinema not only entertains us but also makes us feel and move our emotions.
“And fashion marks or shows the time in which we live, but especially jeans is a piece of clothing that has undergone many changes over time going from being only for the working and poor class to being part of haute couture.
“I use jeans of different brands and some are new and old, the most important thing for me is to find the right tones that I need to give the realism to my pieces.
“The first step is to look for denim jeans of different shades of blue from the darkest to the white.
Once I have this, I start cutting thousands and thousands of pieces and I’m separating them by shades.
“The technique I used is the same one that I use when painting in oil or acrylic paint – I start with the dark tones and I give the light with the light tones, and I glue piece by piece until I complete the piece that contains more than 20,000.”
Cristiam has loved art since he can remember, and began experimenting with different materials when he was only five-years-old.
He also shares his creations on his Instagram, (@cristiamramosart)
In one post, he shared a video of the painstaking process to create the Marilyn portrait.
He can be seen cutting up some pieces of different jeans before gluing and layering them together on a canvas. He then uses long pieces of fabric for her hair, and lighter materials to highlight the blonde.
The video garnered thousands of views and comments from impressed fans.
One person said: “Incredible.”
Someone else added: “Cool!”
Will wrote: “Wow.”
“Amazing,” added Betty.
Cristiam then posted a picture of his creation of actress Brooke Shields.
“Swear that’s really all Calvin K jeans!? Amaze!” commented Rob. [sic]
“That is fantabulous, outstandingly made of denim?” wrote someone else. [sic]
Cristiam added: “I never know what the next material I’m going to use is, I love to challenge myself, and I like difficult things.
“My wish as an artist is to be able to inspire young people and children to create and make art, using all the materials that they have available and that there is always something new to be done.”
