Knowing about my obsession with all things photo mosaic related, a friend recently sent me to the Instagram account of a 25-year-old Italian artist who creates uncanny Rubik’s Cube Mosaics of celebrities! These Rubik’s Cube Mosaics are made up of 6 colors and hundreds of the twistable little cubes!

With only the six colors to use as the pixels that come in a Rubik’s Cube, Contardi uses hundreds to create these realistic iconic portraits. In an interview with CNBC, the artist says they take weeks to create but there is a big pay off. Most portraits sell for a few thousand dollars.

After spending years of solving Rubik’s Cubes competitively, the artist merged his quick hands and his passion for faces and expressions into his unique art form.

His first portrait was created for a high school project and took 900 Rubik’s Cubes to create. Fast forward a few years and Contardi has started sharing his celeb portraits on social media, getting the attention of his subjects. The first portrait that he sold was of Amy Winehouse and went for $5,000 but his highest earned portrait to date was for a $29,000 private commission just last year.

The limitation of only 6 colors to work with (red, white, yellow, orange, green and blue) is not unlike the complexity of creating a photo mosaic using individual photos as the pixels to make a larger image. Giovanni’s larger than life portraits of celebrities like Lebron James, John Lennon and most recently, the late Kobe Bryant (using 1,312 cubes!) is definitely something to marvel at and I look forward to seeing his next portrait pop up on my Instagram feed!