Croatian artist Ivan Mavrovic turns modern technology into steampunk gadgets that still retain their functionality.

In a world where everyone seems interested only in getting their hands on the latest futuristic designs when it comes to gadgets, some, like Ivan Mavrovic, prefer to look back in history, to the time of the Victorian era, when brass, copper and wood were the main ingredients that made things cool. But interlacing modern tech with steampunk design isn’t easy, especially if you want to maintain functionality, but Croatian steampunk enthusiast Ivan Mavrovic does a fantastic job. Not only do his retro-cell phones look incredibly cool, but they also work as well as normal modern-day phones. They may not be as feature-full as today’s smartphones, but his sturdy converted Nokia phones work perfectly and make gorgeous accessories.

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Cincinnati-based photographer, Kelly McCollam recreates classic paintings, particularly Vincent van Gogh’s, using salts, spices and food coloring.

You could say Kelly McCollam is literally spicing things up in the art world, with her original interpretations of van Gogh’s masterpieces. While most people use pinches of seasoning to make their cooking tolerable, the skilled photographer uses handfuls to create artworks. Her favorite materials include salt, food coloring and various spices, from cloves and onion chips to mustard and lemon powder. After carefully spreading the spices on a board and arranging them to best replicate van Gogh’s works, she photographs them and simply wipes them off. It’s kind of painful, considering the effort and patience that must go into something like this, but Kelly is a photographer, and that’s what she’s really all about. The grainy and flaky textures of the artworks really improves the quality and effectiveness of her photos, which become masterpieces in their own right.

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Qu Zhibo, a chef from Zigong City, China’s Sichuan Province, spent three years and just 4,000 yuan ($628) building his own knockoff Jeep. His efforts have made him somewhat of an Internet celebrity, in China.

I was convinced Chinese car enthusiasts can be very resourceful when it comes to building their own dream cars after seeing photos of a young man working on his home-made Lamborghini, so Qu Zhibo’s achievement just comes as a confirmation. Because he was busy running his own restaurant, Qu Zhibo took three years to complete work on his 2-meters-long, 1.5-meters-high Jeep, but he did use just 600 bucks to do it. The car, which many Chinese netizens called a “knockoff Hummer” was actually inspired by an American military vehicle, and even though right now it pretty much looks like a pile of junk on wheels, a bit of camouflage paint could go a long way.

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We’ve posted some pretty cool Transformers statues and costumes here, on Oddity Central, but the Brooklyn RobotWorks costumes created by artist/cosplayer Peter Kokis are unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

When we look around the house, in our kitchens and bathrooms, most of us see a lot junk we don’t use very often, but Peter Kokis sees the perfect materials to build his über-awesome exoskeletons and thus bring our favorite Autobots to life. Looking at his creations for the first time, your jaw suddenly hits the floor as you stare in awe, but as Peter anticipates, looking a little closer you’ll eventually say “hey, I have those at home”. It’s hard to believe, but he’s somehow able to turn a common dog bowl into the perfect cannon muzzle and pooper-scoopers into realistic shins.

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7 Great Inventors Killed by Their Own Inventions (Environmental Graffiti)

LEGO Tourist Travels the World (Orange News)

Chinese Rapunzel Has World’s Longest Hair (Sina)

10 Incredibly Bizarre Art Installations (Oddee)

Stuntman Balances on His Head, on a Spike (Daily Mail)

Man Fakes Mother’s Obituary to Get Time Off (Huufington Post)

World’s 7 Creepiest Abandoned Zoos (Environmental Graffiti)

Totally Awesome Diablo 3 Body Costume (YouTube)

Japan’s Regal Dancing Monkeys (MyModernMet)

Taekwondo Finger Guy Is a handy Martial Arts Expert (Laughing Squid)

It sounds like the title of a horror flick, but it’s actually a short video documenting artist Molly Crabapple‘s project, for which she locked herself in a hotel room covered the walls with doodles.

Molly started contemplating “what happens when an artist leaves their studio, their cliches, and their comfort zone and draws beyond the limits of their endurance” and she also wanted “to see what tarts and squidbeasts look like frollicking on a massive scale”. So she decided to spend her 28th birthday locked in an East Village room, covering the walls with art. She began by launching a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help cover the cost of her daring project, including the photographic talents of Steve Prue. In September 2011 she did just what she promised, and spent five days locked in a room making art. Luckily, she wasn’t alone, as she brought along Keith Jenson from Brainwomb to document the experience, and also had a “cast of muses, musicians and miscreants” to keep her company.

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It might look like just an old typewriter, but Washington-based artist Tyree Callahan has actually converted this antique 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter into an art instrument that makes beautiful paintings.

Callahan replaced the ink pads of the typewriter with colored paint pads and the letters with color markers, to create a painting machine he calls a Chromatic Typewriter. So instead of creating paintings with brushes, he types them with his unique typewriter. While it would take a while getting used to, and although it will probably never yield the detailed results of a brush, I have no doubt this thing could produce some pretty awesome artworks. After all, artists like Keira Rathbone use conventional typewriters to create exceptional works of art using just letters and symbols. I know it sounds strange, but lets face it, artists have used stranger things to unleash their painting talent (vomit, remote-controlled cars or their lips, just to name a few).

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Pat Vaillancourt is the current record holder for the most web addresses tattooed on his body, with over 10,000 URL’s inked on his back and shoulders. That sounds like a lot, but he’s not stopping until his body is covered by 100,000 website addresses.

In 2010, 30-year-old Vaillancourt, from Quebec, Canada, decided he wanted to set a world record of his own, and because he wasn’t an athlete and he couldn’t do extreme stunts, he chose tattooing as the way to leave his mark on the world. “I want to break a Guinness World Record, but more importantly, I want to help others. And this is my way of doing so,” he said back then. People and businesses can pay $35 to have their URL tattooed on Pat’s body and listed on his website, Back2thelight.com, with half the proceeds being donated to help the people of Haiti and Somalia. Vaillancourt says the other half is used to pay for his tattoos and promote the project. If my calculations are correct, he hopes to ultimately raise $3.5 million, including expenses.

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Artist Ian Cook has a unique painting style which involves dipping remote-controlled cars in paint and driving them across the canvas to create colorful contemporary artworks.

Nicknamed “Pic-cars-so”, 28-year-old Cook has developed a special painting style known as “Auto Drawing”. He uses various remote-controlled toy cars to spread acrylic paint across the canvas, creating incredibly detailed masterpieces. “I wanted to be an artist from a young age and decided that to be successful I needed something completely unique,” Ian says about his bizarre choice of “brushes”. “I’ve always been mad about anything with wheels and I figured that using cars to paint cars would capture peoples’ imaginations, so I experimented at home by driving some remote control models through paint.” Believe it or not, the idea first came to him after he got a remote-controlled car for Christmas and was told not to get paint on it.

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People have been photocopying their body parts for a while now, and even though it’s still pretty funny, it’s not that impressive at it once was. But what about a portrait of a photocopied face recreated with over 3 million dots, is that impressive enough for ya?

Artist Miguel Endara started out with a portrait  of his father’s photocopied face, and somewhere along the way he decided to recreate it with millions of dots made with a variety of Micron pens. he took a piece of paper, drew an outline of his dad’s face with a pencil and started adding dots. As you can imagine, this kind of painstaking work takes a lot of patience, and luckily Miguel managed to keep it together for all the 210 hours it took him to finish his masterpiece. He even made a cool video documenting his amazing effort and posted a high resolution image of the portrait on his website, so you can actually see all of the 3.2 millions of dots he had to use.

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90’s Boy-Band, Hanson, to Launch Their Own Beer, Called “MMMHop” (Contact Music)

Pee-Powered Video Games Hit London Pub (The Sun)

Man Has 120 Kg Alligator Pet, Says He’s a Gentle Giant (Daily Mail)

Exploring the Decaying Chambers of an Abandoned Slaughterhouse (Environmental Graffiti)

Ugandan Space Chief Builds Test Craft in Mother’s Muddy Backyard (MSN Photoblog)

China Sets Record for World’s Longest Christmas Cake (NDTV)

Woman Reveals Cement Cheek Implants Done by Fake Doctor (Huffington Post)

600,000 LEGO Bricks Christmas Tree Built in London (Brothers Brick)

12 Incredible Visions of Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

Mom Says World of Warcraft Turned Son into Raging Hunchback (Geekologie)

Although it’s December and the skiing season is officially open, there is no sign of snow in the Tyrol region of Austria. But that’s no reason not to ski, at least not for those brave enough to practice the winter sport on a rock-covered slope.

45 kilometers west of Innsbruck, near the picturesque village of Haiming, skiers have found the perfect place to test out their skiing equipment, even though there’s not one white patch of snow in sight. The brave daredevils climb a rock-covered slope on foot and descend on their skis, leaving a cloud of dust behind them. The rocks aren’t as smooth as snow, and they obviously do a lot of damage to their equipment, but the avid skiers don’t seem to mind, as long as they get to practice their favorite sport. Falling of your skies during a descent on the rocky slope of Haiming isn’t what you’d call a pleasurable experience, that’s why only experienced skiers are advised to try their luck here.

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Argentinian art collective Mondongo creates incredibly detailed portraits by using dripped and molded Plasticine. I can’t imagine how much time they spend getting the skin tones just right.

We’ve posted our share of impressive portraits here on OC, made from the most unusual materials (from pancakes and chewing gum to written words), but few more detailed than the masterpieces created by Mondongo. The art collective, which consists of  Juliana Laffitte, Manuel Mendanha and Agustina Picasso, was founded in 1999 and has worked with  a huge variety of materials, from food to plasticine, depending on what best reinforces the concept of the work. Mondongo, which is the name of a traditional Argentinian tripe stew, was chosen precisely becomes the art collective creates its work from a cauldron of ingredients.

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Saimir Stari, one of the world’s most famous mosaic artists, is working on yet another mind-blowing masterpiece, this time using approximately one million coffee beans.

The Albanian artist known for creating large-scale art pieces made with the most unusual art mediums (from cork screws and toothpicks to paintbrushes) has recently started work on another massive mosaic, this time mad of coffee beans. Entitled “One World, One Family, One Coffee”, the original mosaic features five characters, each representing a different continent. As you might have guessed, the objective of Strati’s work is to inspire of sense of unit across the world. The patient artist is painstakingly working on his one million coffee beans mosaic in Tirana, Albania, and plans on completing the project on December 12. When finished, his unique artwork will measure 25 square meters and weigh 140 kilograms. As with his other impressive mosaic, Saimir Strati will most likely set a new Guinness record with his coffee bean project.

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They can turn your body into a living masterpiece, but tattoo artists also have the power to make your life hell, every time you look in the mirror. Case in point, Rosie Brovent, who got more than she bargained for when she let her boyfriend tattoo her back.

Just to be clear from the start, this really isn’t verified news, since it first appeared on a rather obscure blog, with no link to any established media outlet. Still, I thought it was simply too cool not to feature on OC. Tattoo artist, Ryan L. Fitzjerald and his now ex-girlfriend Rosie Brovent, both residents of a trailer park in Dayton, Ohio, are the main protagonists one of the weirdest/funniest stories I’ve read in a while. Brovent is accusing her ex of tattooing a huge steaming pile of crap with flies buzzing around it, instead of a scene from Narnia. Read More »