Egyptian artist Hany Genedy focuses as he carefully pours white salt onto a black surface to create an image of actor Al Pacino.
Genedy experimented with materials such as leaves and money before settling on a substance he says is versatile and cheap - salt.
Genedy, who crafts images of Egyptian and international celebrities and landmarks, says he thinks only a handful of artists worldwide use the mineral.
Surrounded by assorted colours of salt in his home studio in a village in the Nile Delta province of Sharqia, the 24-year-old says he developed a secret technique to fix his images.
“At first it took me four or five hours to make a picture with salt then I had to erase it, but later I had the idea of looking for a way to preserve these works,” he said.
“After several attempts I was able to find a way to fix the pictures,” Genedy said, adding some of his salt works have been hanging on the wall for more than three years.
He makes a small income from selling paintings, but hopes his salt art will win recognition in Cairo and internationally.
In another recent incident, an image of a silicon artwork went viral on social media as a dangerous and mysterious creature.
Recently, a post warning farmers of a weird looking animal that is dubbed as highly dangerous went viral on social media. The post was shared several times across social media sites and caused quite a bit of alarm.
The viral image, however, turned out to be nothing more than an artwork. The artwork had quite a number of people fooled into believing it was indeed some strange creature.
A simple reverse image search revealed an Instagram post that was published in July last year, with the caption "hybrid armadillo", that belonged to surreal artist Laira Maganuco who dabbles in hyperrealistic sculptures.
( with inputs from Reuters )