No, this portrait isn’t made up of thousands upon thousands of magnetic sculpture beads. The metallic wonder’s lifelike contours and shimmer comes from painstakingly hand-placing 13,000 variably sized platinum beads.
The Japanese jewellers, Platinum Guild International K.K, offer the work, and quotes begin at half a million dollars. This is absurdly expensive, but it’s not altogether incomprehensible considering their impeccable attention to detail.
The construction starts by melting a kilogram of pure platinum ingot, which costs roughly $47,000. This is recast into thousands of 2-5mm beads, which are hand placed, like little pixels, for the difference in cost: $453,000. If this is out of your price range, you’ll just have to wait for the next Instagram update, and hope for a filter to make you look like a pixilated Han Solo in carbonite. [Platinum Sphere Portrait] via [Petapixel]