Sachin Sanghe, a micro-sculpture artist and software engineer from Bengaluru, creates unbelievably detailed sculptures on pieces of chalk and pencil lead. After looking at these incredible miniature carvings, one remains flabbergasted that how the highly meticulous objects like cartoon characters, statues of deities and realistic face carvings can be sculpted on such tiny pieces of graphite and carbonate rock.

While chalk and blackboard seemed to be the most uninteresting things in a classroom in school days, Sanghe was fascinated by chalk pieces and considered them his sole companion. He was intrigued by these old-school writing tools to such an extent that he even solved Math problems on a blackboard at home, back then. His hobbies were pencil sketching and painting, but instead of lead pencil, he used to make portraits on a blackboard.

Initially, he started off with carving alphabets on chalks and even carved names of friends and relative for unique gifts items. After years of practice, he thought of carving human faces by joining two to three pieces of chalk together. This further lead to the creation of many incredible miniature figurines, including the face carving of legendary Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan.

The self-taught chalk sculptor calls this art ‘chalkruti’ and has carved more that 100 art pieces within the last 13 years. One surely needs full control on their hands to master this art, as it requires the right amount of needle-tip pressure on certain parts of chalk/lead. And, there are no short cuts in learning – all you need to do is keep practicing until you get that right.

We’re totally awe-struck by this astonishing art by Sachin Sanghe. Check out the images below to see more creations by him. You can also see more of Sanghe’s work on his Facebook page.