From the Metro newspaper April 2, 2014
Artist Vic Muniz and designer Marcelo Coelho have teamed up to etch pictures of castles on individual grains of sand - a project 4 years in the making. The Brazilian duo partnered up to use a painstaking technique of using an ion beam to draw images less than half a millimetre in length of European castles.
Muniz drew the castles using a camera lucida, a 19th century optical aid for sketching. Coelho the etched the drawings onto a grain using a focused ion beam that's capable of creating a line 50 nanometres wide. An electron microscope to scan the entire grain to make the final picture.
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