The title is a little misleading, so to make things clear, we’re talking about the face of Iron Man made of real urine, in a toilet bowl. This unusual artwork was actually considered better than 600 other entries in a popular art competition.

You don’t often get the chance to associate Iron Man with urine, but this is one of those rare occasions, and we only have a geeky Taiwanese guy to thank for it. But how does one get the crazy idea to paint a portrait of one of Marvel’s most popular superheroes with urine. Well, this particular art school graduate was taking care of business one day, in the bathroom, when he noticed blood in his urine. Now, most everyone else would have panicked and ran straight to the doctor, but not this fellow. Looking at the colors in his pee, he immediately thought of the colors of Iron Man’s suit, and felt inspired to create a portrait of the popular crime-fighter using his very own urine. Read More »

“There’s no place like home!”, I believe the saying goes, and this modest migrant family from China proves it applies even when home is an abandoned public toilet in the city of Shenyang.

Zeng Lingjun was born in a small village, in the Jilin Province of Northeastern China. As a boy, he dreamed of one day attending college, but because his family was too poor he had to abandon his dream and settle for becoming a cobbler and repair shoes for a living. But just because he couldn’t afford to go to college, didn’t mean he was willing to spend the rest of his life in his village. He had bigger plans for himself, so one day, with just 50 yuan ($8) in his pocket, he left for Shenyang, the biggest city in northeast China. Being a hard worker and a skilled cobbler helped Zeng make a living in the big city, and he was soon earning around 2,000 yuan (315) per month. But this wasn’t enough for him to get his own place.

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Artist Peter Root spent three weeks carving 80 kilograms of potatoes into office buildings, homes and various other structures, using only a knife and a bicycle repair kit. His unique potato city model is called Plot.

Although Plot was created in Istanbul, 33-year-old Peter Root says his creation wasn’t modeled on the Turkish city, but rather influenced my various aspects of the historical city. The artist, who eats potatoes at least once a week, says he chose the popular vegetables because they are available in abundance and are “amazing to work with”. They can be carved, sliced, chopped, drawn into, balanced and dried, Root said. Lucky for him, the artist didn’t have to peel all 80 kg of potatoes, as he decided to leave some of the skin intact, to encourage the growing of shoots.

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The Near Annihilation of the American Buffalo (Environmental Graffiti)

Chefs Create Menu for Space Tourists (Techeye)

Sheep-Shearing Course Helps Businessmen Relieve Stress (Youtube)

Homeless Man Poses as Woman for 13 Years for Free Medical Care (Fox News)

GPS System Leads Japanese Students into Oyster Point Bay (Bayside Bulletin)

Awesome Photos from Inside Musical Instruments (Behance)

12 Amazing Recycled Dragons (Environmental Graffiti)

Camping Tents That Look Like Real Food (Laughing Squid)

The Man-Made Clouds of Berndnaut Smilds (Designboom)

20 Amazing Look-Alikes (Oddee)

Korean artist Kim Dong Yoo creates amazing portraits of various icons like Audrey Hepburn or Michael Jackson, made up of hundreds of smaller painted portraits that either support or contradict the main subject of the artwork.

Over the years, we’ve featured some truly interesting celebrity portraits on Oddity Central, like Jason Mecier’s pill portraits, or Jason Kronenwald’s chewing gum creations, but we’ve never seen anything like Kim Dong Yoo’s works. This incredibly talented artist painstakingly paints hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of miniature portraits by hand, using them as smaller piece of a much bigger, unbelievably detailed portrait. His portraits look a lot like the stamp paintings of Peter R. Mason, only instead of using recycled stamps to recreate the faces of many historical and Hollywood icons, the Korean painter actually paints every one of the little images that make up the big portraits.

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Don’t you ever wish you could stuff your face with all kinds of delicious treats without feeling guilty about putting on weight? I know I have, and it seems now, thanks to some simple inhalers from a company called Vaportrim, we’ll be able to do just that.

Are you familiar with electronic cigarettes? They are ingenious cigarette-like gadgets designed as an alternative for smokers who just can’t shake the habit. Basically they turn a nicotine-containing liquid into vapor that is allegedly a lot safer than tobacco smoke. US-based company Vaportrim was apparently inspired by e-cigarette technology to create a similar device that is meant to help people lose weight. Their particular health-aids apparently allow users to inhale delicious sweets like vanilla cupcakes or blueberry muffins without the many calories that usually come with them. The US-based company is actually advertising its product as the world’s first calorie-free dessert. That sounds great in theory, but does it really work?

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Cupcake ATMs Bring Sweat Treats to the Streets of New York (NY Post)

The Grinning Skeletons of Peru’s 1000-Year-Old Nazca Cemetery (Environmental Graffiti)

England’s Guerrilla Tree Sculptor (Treehugger)

World’s Most Expensive Watch Costs $5 Million (LA Times)

Common Heart Disease Drug May Also Cure Racism (Orange News)

Kim Jong-Il Lookalike Has Problems Getting Dates (The Sun)

Woman Is Really in Love with the Statue of Liberty (Daily Mail)

Welded Sculptures Made from Discarded and Recycled Objects (This Is Colossal)

25 Vertigo-Inducing Views from the Highest Atriums in the World (Environmental Graffiti)

Graffiti Artist Decorates Paris Hotel Room (The Big Addict)

Los Angeles-based artist Allison Cortson collects dust from her art-subjects’s homes and uses it to paint the background of their portraits. She started her series of “dusty” artworks, called Dust Paintings, several years ago, but she’s only just now getting the online exposure she so rightfully deserves.

Dust paintings…Now here’s something you don’t see every day, right? Well, actually, just a month ago we posted a story about Alessandro Ricci, an Italian artist who paints with dust collected from historical buildings in Florence. But while his dust creations are more like environmental statements against the pollution in his home city, Allison Cortson’s paintings are much more elaborate, and have a completely different purpose. Through her dust paintings, the artist tries to emphasize the fact that “matter is mostly empty space” and  it’s only through interactivity with living beings that they provide any value. That’s why, in all of her Dust Paintings artworks the human subjects are painted in color, while the background is recreated with dust.

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I find it fascinating how some artists can turn rigid materials into works of art that seem almost organic. Case in point, Kevin Iris, a man who creates beautiful tree sculptures exclusively from aluminum wire.

A self-proclaimed “treenut” Kevin Iris has been making incredibly detailed tree sculptures from aluminum wire for the last 23 years. His works vary in shape and size, as he’s trying to inspire different emotions with each one, but the most remarkable thing that’s common to all of them is that they are made only out of twisted wire. That means he uses no glue, coatings or any other substances. he simply takes tens of feet of aluminum wire and twists them into a variety of shapes. As you can imagine, Kevin’s artistic process is very laborious and time-consuming. For example, talking about the aluminum tree n the photo below, the artist says “I average about 26 leaves per strand so I have about 10,062 leaves up there on the top. This [22-inch wide] tree took about 450 hours or so of hands on twisting wire time over four months.” Pretty remarkable stuff…

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Who needs chairs when you can just relax and have a cup of coffee or tea in a comfortable hammock, right? That was probably the idea behind Mahika Mano, a popular Tokyo venue, better known as the Hammock Cafe.

Located in the Kichijoji district of Tokyo, a place renowned for its chill-out atmosphere, Mahika Mano fits in just perfectly, with its hammocks hanging from the ceiling inviting passers-by to just sit back and enjoy a tasty drink. As soon as you walk in, the first thing that hits you is the absence of chairs, but as soon as you lay down in one of the hanging nets you start to wonder who ever got the crazy idea of using chairs, when hammocks are so much more comfy. As you can imagine, this unique cafe is pretty busy (sometimes you have to wait in a queue to grab a seat hammock) so the place has implemented a time limit of 90 to 120 minutes, so that everyone can have a chance to literally hang out. Whether this policy is enforced or not depends on the occupancy of the cafe.

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Most people love taking photos of themselves underwater, but English artist Sarah Harvey isn’t like people. She likes to take things to a whole new level by using photos of herself underwater as reference for her incredibly realistic paintings.

Most often than not, Sarah likes to be both the artist and the subject of her artworks. She puts on a bathing suit, jumps in one of London’s oldest pools and goes underwater so her photographer friend can take a series of photos. She takes into consideration the position of the sun every time she prepares for a photo shoot, and tries to include its reflection on the water whenever she can, along with the surrounding darkness to create a contrast that makes the distorted human figure look even more interesting. Once work at the pool is completed, the artist heads for her studio in East London, where she selects the best photos and starts placing them one over the other to create a collage.

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Incredible Animal Treehuggers (Environmental Graffiti)

Polish Ghost-Hunter Plans Census to Monitor Vanishing Ghosts (Austrian Times)

14-Year-Old Builds Working LEGO Printer (Bit Rebels)

Chinese Man Builds His Own Plane Out of Junk (Metro)

World’s Oldest Vacuum Cleaner Still SUcks after 108 Years (Mirror)

World of Warcraft Full Back Tattoo (Geekologie)

Portrait Made from 15,000 Push Pins (Dailymotion)

1550 Chairs Stacked Between Buildings (My Modern Met)

Spider vs. Wasp: A Deadly Battle in Pictures (Environmental Graffiti)

World’s Longest Tree-Top Walkway (Amusing Planet)

We’ve seen insects used as art protagonists before. Mike Libby turns them into steampunk hybrids, and Ubyka creates armed insect cyborgs, but I haven’t seen anything like what Andrey Pavlov does with ants.  This is the touching story of a man who found comfort in studying and immortalizing hardworking ants performing their daily routines.

Andrey Pavlov wasn’t particularly interested in macro photography until seven years ago, when a spinal injury caused him to remain immobilized. That’s when he fell under the charm of these amazing earthlings called ants. He started reading books about them and their behavior, and became fascinated with the way the ant community cares for its weaker members – the children, the old, and the disabled. That’s when he realized they were creatures that commanded respect. This civilization that for the last 150 million years has mastered so many environmentally sustainable ways of surviving and evolving at the same time, really impressed him. So he made it a hobby to observe and take photos of these incredible insects.

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Janio Nunez is a talented Cuban artist who has the gift of making incredible sculptures exclusively from tobacco leaves. He creates works of art both tiny and life-size that prove there are better things to do with tobacco than smoking it.

Janio’s fascination with tobacco began as a little boy, watching his grandparents roll cigars at the factory. He started copying them and ended up becoming a tobacco leaf roller himself. He worked at the factory, but after passing evaluations, he was sent to Varadero, Cuba’s largest resort in Cuba, to roll cigars for tourists. Everything was normal until one day when something really strange happened. He began seeing his co-workers like they were made entirely of tobacco leaves. He would get scared and close his eyes, and when he opened them they were normal again, dressed in their regular clothes. Then would turn around and see another colleague sitting down, all made of tobacco (clothes, face, skin, etc.). This happened sporadically for about four months, and his friends even took him to see a doctor about his “problem”. That didn’t help very much, and realizing something was wrong with him, he decided to do somehow fix things himself.

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Using various everyday objects and back light, Azerbaijani artist Rashad Alakbarov creates mind-blowing shadow paintings.

It always amazes me what some people can achieve by using the simplest materials and their imagination. Rashad Alakbarov is definitely one of these incredible individuals; using common items like empty plastic bottles, metal pipes or simple pieces of plastic and back light, he creates amazing works of art. Either by hanging these items from the ceiling, or carefully positioning them on a table, Alakbarov manages to produce incredible shadow paintings.

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