Man Falls Into Giant Hole After Stepping into It to Check if It’s Real

A man was recently injured after falling into an 8-foot-deep art installation at the Serralves Foundation Museum in Porto, Portugal. He apparently though it looked fake, so he decided to step into it to make sure.

Created by acclaimed British artist Anish Kapoor in 1992, “Descent Into Limbo” is an optical illusion that looks like a black circle painted on the floor. It’s designed to appear like a bottomless pit and staring into is is reportedly a dizzying experience, but one unnamed Italian tourist visiting the installation last week apparently wanted to do more than that. Despite several warning signs and a staffer tasked with keeping visitors safe, the man somehow managed to test the fake-looking pit by stepping into it. He got injured after taking an 8-foot fall, but at least he satisfied his curiosity.

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High-School Student Creates Monstrous Action Figures Out of Cicada Shells

A Japanese high-school student recently got his five minutes of fame on Twitter after posting photos of an incredibly detailed action figure he made out of around 300 discarded cicada shells.

Twitter-user @ride_hero came up with the idea of using discarded cicada shells for artistic purposes after accidentally stepping on one at school. Looking at the shattered shell, he thought to himself “what a waste” and challenged himself to come up with a way of reusing all the discarded cicada shells at his high-school. Evening Cicadas, or Higurashi, are very common in Japan during the summertime, and they tend to shed their shells almost everywhere, so it wasn’t hard for @ride_hero to collect hundreds of them in his high-school yard alone. After finishing his AO exams, the high-school senior needed to kill some time over the summer vacation, so he started experimenting with the collected cicada shells.

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The Amazing Stone Paintings of Stefano Furlani

Maybe “stone paintings” isn’t the best phrase to describe the amazing artworks of Stefano Furlani, but it’s so unusual that I just didn’t know what to call it. The Italian artist basically searches for geometrically appropriate stones on the beach and arranges them to create complex compositions.

Stefano Furlani discovered this fascinating art form while playing with his son Davide, when he was three years old. They would scour the beach for strangely shaped stones and then assemble them into all kinds of shapes and designs, on the sand, under an umbrella. As time passed and they both got better at this ‘game’, they started creating more and more intricate and detailed artworks, and at one point, Stefano started feeling disappointed that the artworks he and his son had worked so hard to create got washed out by the sea or trampled on by other people. So he started creating these stone compositions on hard canvases and preserving them as proper works of art.

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11-Year-Old Artist Creates Incredible Hyperrealistic Drawings

Some artists spend decades honing their skills before even tackling hyperrealistic art, but 11-year-old Kareem Waris Olamilekan is already a professional artist with some stunning hyperrealistic artworks in his portfolio.

Kareem, who hails from Lagos, Nigeria, started expressing his artistic talents when he was around six years old, by drawing his favorite cartoon characters. His big break however, occurred two years later, when he and his family moved houses and he discovered the Ayowole Art Vocational Academy. His talent for drawing was evident, and despite facing great financial difficulties and struggling to buy basic artistic supplies, the young boy managed to improve his skills to the point where he is now able to draw detailed photo-like drawings.

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Japanese Artist Creates Incredibly Realistic Wool Felt Animals

Miru, a Tokushima-based wool felt artist, has been getting a lot of attention on Japanese social media for his incredibly realistic wool-felt animals. Looking at some of his works, it’s not hard to see why everyone is so impressed.

Miru discovered wool felt art in 2010, when he saw a master of the craft work his magic during a TV show. He was captivated by this art form soon started experimenting with the material. However, at one point he realized that he needed a bit of guidance to unleash his full artistic potential, so he bought a book on wool felt art that he claims opened his eyes to the possibilities of the material. Over the last 8 years he has honed his skills to the point where it is sometimes nearly impossible to tell some of his wool felt animals apart from live ones.

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Artist Spends 14 Months Creating the Most Incredible Ghost Pirate Ship Sculpture

Jason Stieva has been doing Gothic assemblage art for roughly two decades, but his most intricate and impressive creation has to be the Leviathan – Ark of Apocalypse, an 8 feet high, 7.5 feet long ghost ship populated by hundreds of strange creatures.

Most of the artworks in Jason Stieva’s ongoing “Gothic Times” series are incredibly detailed, but he himself admits that the Leviathan – Ark of the Apocalypse was his most daunting project ever, and that he will most likely will never make anything like it again. And just looking at pictures of this incredible artwork, you can understand why. Although measuring over 7 meters in length, 2.5 meters in width and standing at a whopping 8 feet tall, this ghostly ship is brimming with detail. From the steampunk-inspired gears at the bottom of the ship and the dozens of cannons dominating its sides, to the hundreds of skeletons and other ghastly creatures populating its deck and multiple crow’s nests, it’s just so much to take in.

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The Stunning Artworks of “Needle Man”, the World’s Only Sewing Machine Painter

Arun Kumar Bajaj has a very unusual skill – he can paint with a sewing machine. Technically, it’s embroidering, not painting, but his artworks are so incredibly detailed that they could pass as hyper-realistic paintings to the untrained eye. And the fact that he does it all with a sewing machine just makes it that much more impressive.

Arun was really good at drawing and painting growing up and dreamed of becoming a famous painter, but his father’s sudden death, 15 years ago, foiled his plans and forced him to abandon school in order to run the family business. His father was a tailor and he became one too, but he didn’t let the artist in him die. Instead, he started “painting” with needle and thread, but instead of using his hands, he decided on a rather unusual embroidering tool – the sewing machine. It took him a while to master this unique art form, but today he is recognized as the world’s only sewing machine artist.

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Tattoo Artist Creates Stunning Portraits Entirely Out of ASCII Code

Invented in the 1970s, ASCII art is still popular in online chats, on forums and websites, but one insanely talented tattoo artist is able to ink stunning portraits using only the 95 characters characters from the 1963 American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) standard on his clients’ skin.

31-year-old Andreas Vrontis has always been fascinated by ASCII art and “how a simple lettering pattern could create so much symmetry and detail in the end result”, so a few years ago, he started experimenting with ways to integrate the digital art style into his real-life tattoos. Vrontis has been tattooing for six years, but he made his first ASCII tattoo in 2015, a portrait of John Lennon. He was nervous about how it would turn out, but it ended up winning him the “Best in Show” prize at at the Cyprus International Tattoo Convention. He has been improving his technique ever since, and his latest works of art simply breathtaking.

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Werepups – Artist Creates Eerily Lifelike Werewolf Babies

Asia Eriksen, a horror enthusiast from Coaldale, Pennsylvania, has found an intriguing way of combining her artistic talent and her passion for horror – she spends weeks, sometimes even month,s creating custom werewolf babies called “werepups”.

34-year-old Asia Eriksen got the idea for her creepy Werepups as a child. The horror flick Silver Bullet got her really interested in werewolves, and at one point she started thinking about having a baby werewold for a pet. However, the horror enthusiast had no idea that she would end up making her childhood fantasy a reality herself, until she met her husband, who worked in special effects. Asia started experimenting with his materials and at one point made her first werepup sculpture, which her husband turned into a mould. The artist recalls that, at the time, she was just making the toy she had dreamed of as a child, not knowing that others would be interested in it. Today, werepups are so sought-after by horror fans that Eriksen can hardly keep up with demand.

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French Artist Makes Money by Incorporating QR Codes into His Murals

A French street artist has found a way to bring Bitcoin to the art world. By incorporating QR codes in his murals, he is able to receive donations directly from passers-by who appreciate his artworks.

Pascal ‘PBOY’ Boyart started adding Bitcoin QR codes to his street murals in November 2017, and he has so far received over $1,000 in cryptocurrency donations from people who just wanted to show their appreciation and support for his art. The donation system is extremely simple and fast – anyone with a smartphone and a Bitcoin wallet can just scan the QR code in the mural and transfer funds directly to the artist. Boyart isn’t sure if he is the first artist to use this system, but he definitely sees others relying on decentralised currencies going forward, as it cuts the middlemen – art galleries or crowdfunding platforms – allowing artists to directly connect to their audience.

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Jelly Alchemy – The Amazing 3D Jelly Cakes of Siew Heng Boon

Jelly cakes don’t really sound very appetizing, or particularly impressive for that matter, but that’s only because you’ve probably never seen one of Siew Heng Boon’s amazing 3D jelly cakes.

Intricately-designed 3D jelly cakes are really popular in South-East Asian countries like Vietnam and Malaysia, and in Mexico, but some of the world’s most amazing such edible masterpieces are actually created by an Australian artist from Sidney. Siew Heng Boon has been making 3D jelly cakes for only two years now, but she’s already considered a master of the trade, and her incredible creations often have people do a double take.

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Artist Creates Amazing ‘Web Portraits’ Using a Single Sewing Thread

Slovenian artist Sašo Krajnc creates incredibly detailed portraits by tightly winding a single sewing thread on a circular wooden frame to create overlapping straight lines.

That’s actually the most impressive thing about Sašo Krajnc, that he’s able to create such detailed facial features, like the curvatures of the eyes and lips, using only straight lines. He starts out with a circular frame made of wood or aluminium and lined with metal nails. He then takes a long sewing thread and begins winding it around these nails creating hundreds, or even thousands of black straight lines that crisscross and overlap to emphasise the features of his subjects.

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Japanese Artist Twists Copper and Brass Wire Into the Most Incredible Sculptures

When it comes to metallic wire artworks, you’ll have a tough time finding a more talented artist than @tdaiki1216, a young Japanese art graduate who seems able to twist copper and brass wire into pretty much anything he sets his mind to, from sculptures that look like drawn manga, to slithering snakes and giant insects.

@tdaiki1216, whose real name is Tsutamoto Dawiki, first made headlines in Japan two years ago, when his incredibly detailed wire sculptures imitating manga drawings went viral on Twitter. Fixed into square wooden blocks and placed against a white background, his artworks looked exactly like manga comics, even though they were actually twisted pieces of wire. Those were impressive enough, but @tdaiki1216 has stepped up his game even more over these last few years, and is now specializing in more complex wire sculptures, some of which are simply mind-blowing.

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Artist Creates Detailed Portraits Entirely Out of Handwritten Text

California-based artist Phil Vance spends hundreds of hours creating typography portraits of historical icons entirely out of handwritten words and phrases.

From afar, Phil Vance’s typography portraits look like expertly drawn artworks, but as you draw nearer to them, you start to see that every feature is actually made up of handwritten text. Once you start deciphering all the words, you realize they are famous quotes of the subject written over and over again. The talented artist describes his art as “cross-hatching but with words.”

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Makeup Enthusiast Turns Her Face Into Striking Optical Illusions

Monika Falčik, a 22-year-old makeup junky from Lithuania, has been getting a lot of attention on social media lately for her impressive optical illusions, using face paint and makeup to make her face look warped, sliced or detached from her head.

Falčik has been getting some attention on Instagram for a while now, by posting mainly makeup and travel related photos, but her number of followers skyrocketed once she started posting facial optical illusions, late last year. It all started on Halloween, when Monika decided to use some of the tricks she had learned watching makeup and special effects tutorials on YouTube to give herself a creepy look for the holiday. She got huge feedback from her Instagram followers, and she’s been treating them to various optical illusions ever since.

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