Not everyone is bending it like Beckham this soccer season. Meet Hong Yi, the artist who has painted brilliant portraits of Ronaldo, Neymar and Messi using... wait for it... a football.
If you don't believe us, watch the video below to see Hong Yi work a football on the canvas like a pro "just in time for World Cup 2014." And no, she really can't kick the ball but who cares, with a talent like hers?
Hong Yi nicknamed Red, "loves to paint, but not with a paintbrush." And boy is she good! Pencil shavings, food, cosmetics, books, styrofoam plates, matchsticks - she can create beautiful pieces with ordinary daily objects and paints.
Earlier this year, Red created a portrait of actor and martial artist Jackie Chan with 64,000 chopsticks. "As he is also an environmentalist, I used disposable bamboo chopsticks to show that discarded materials can be reused and made into something meaningful and beautiful," wrote Hong on YouTube.
She spent an entire month just collecting the chopsticks in Zhejiang and in Beijing. "I also hung 60--for Jackie's 60th birthday--bamboo chopstick holders filled with skewers that formed the word 'long' (dragon) because Jackie's name in Chinese means 'Dragon'," she added.
Watch her in action.
And that's not all. Hong Yi also presented ace tennis star Novak Djokovic with a painting of him she made with a tennis ball and a pair of chopsticks. "He was super friendly and fun, and proved to me he's able to use chopsticks properly," she wrote on Instagram.
Hong Yi wants to continue use her artwork with "mundane, ordinary and often overlooked objects to make beautiful art" and to connect people with each other.