Israeli artist Vika Bren paints her left hand to create various optical illusions that capture the viewer’s imagination when placed against a dark background.
Vika Bren is a young artist from Haifa, Israel who has been drawing a lot of attention online with her eye-catching hand-painted illusions. From realistic holes in her palm to making her whole hand look realistically skeletal, there doesn’t seem to be an end to Vika’s talent and imagination.
Haider Ali, one of Pakistan’s most famous truck art masters, has recently discovered a new and lucrative niche – sneakers painted in traditional, bright motifs.
Truck art is an iconic part of Pakistani culture. For decades, it has been used to turn simple means of locomotion into driveable works of art to be looked at and admired. Now, this traditional art style is branching out to other mediums, the latest of which is sneakers. Haider Ali, a Pakistani truck art specialist was one of the first to jump on the truck-art-sneakers bandwagon, after getting an order for a custom pair and seeing his outrageous price being accepted by the client.
This year, the Nikola-Lenivets art village in Russia celebrated Maslenitsa by burning a 23-meter-tall wooden Tower of Babel, a biblical symbol of discord.
Every year since 2001, Nikola-Lenivets, a popular art park about 220 kilometers from Moscow, has celebrated the Slavic holiday of Maslenitsa by burning a specially-made artwork. Maslenitsa symbolizes the passing of winter and the coming of spring, a new beginning, but this year, the artistic tradition has been more grandiose and more meaningful than ever. A 23-meter-tall wooden tower of Babel designed by young architect Ekaterina Polyakova was set ablaze in a ceremony designed to symbolize the end of discord between nations.
Inspired by geometry, nature and illustrations from vintage science books, Italian artist Michele Volpi creates some of the most unique tattoos you’ll ever see.
Known for his monochromatic fine-blackwork style, Michele Volpi combines his love for the color black with pointilism and with his passion for various sciences to create tattoos that simply stand out. Relying on his background of technical drawing, Volpi expertly renders anything from biological specimens to anatomical diagrams and mysterious physics formulas. Those don’t sound like great idea for tattoos, but the talented Italian artist somehow makes them work.
A “weird thing collector” who paid $50 for a painting at a flea market, despite explicitly being warned that it brought nothing but misfortune, now claims the haunted artwork changed his life for the worse.
Dan Smith – not his real name – bought the unnamed painting of two dolls at a flea market, ignoring the former owner’s warnings that it was bad news. If anything, the fact that it was a bad luck charm was something of a bonus, as he wanted to test it out for himself. Unfortunately, his curiosity had a high price, as he claims he went on an “epic losing streak” as soon as he brought it home with him.
Ivan Djuric, a talented pyrographer from Serbia, creates incredibly detailed portraits of celebrities by burning them onto pieces of wood using a special tool.
Pyrography, as an art form, can be traced back thousands of years, with evidence of its early existence discovered in countries like China, Egypt and the ancient Roman Empire, but modern artists have really elevated pyrography to an unprecedented level. take Serbian artist Ivan Djuric, whose incredibly detailed portraits rival black-and-white photographs in terms of realism. Using a pyrography tool, he applies varying and precise amounts of pressure to change the intensity of the burn, thus achieving various tones and contrasts.
Talented makeup artist and self-described illusionist, Aurelio Sanchez, has been getting a lot of online attention for his ability to transform into celebrities like Mariah Carey or Shakira.
Aurelio Sanchez has always had a thing for impersonating people and film characters, but it wasn’t until one day, at age 18, when he acted out a character for his mom, that he knew that was what he wanted to do with his life. He went on to study makeup and used this newfound knowledge to fulfill his dream, turning himself into doppelgangers of celebrities like legendary Mexican singer, Selena, Oscar-nominated actress and singer, Lady Gaga, Mariah Carey, and many more.
Aria, a 25-year-old self-taught artist from Japan, specializes in 3D color pencil drawings that look ready to jump off of the sheet of paper they are drawn on.
Despite what your eyes are desperately trying to make you think, Aria’s works are all two-dimensional. She just has this innate ability to draw a variety of objects in great detail, and present them from an angle that creates the illusion that they are three-dimensional. Every one of her artworks takes hours to complete and consists of several layers of colored pencils, but the end result is definitely worth the work.
A security guard got so bored on his first day at work that he ruined a million-dollar avant-garde painting by drawing eyes on the faceless figures depicted in the artwork.
Anna Leporskaya’s Three Figures, an artwork painted between 1932 and 1934, was on display at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Ekaterinburg as part of an exhibition when someone noticed something strange about it in December of last year. The three figures depicted in the avant-garde piece were originally faceless, but now two of them had small dots for eyes. The vandalism was first noticed on 7 December by two visitors who alerted the Yeltsin Center staff about it, and a search for the perpetrator began. One thing that no one expected was for the security guard paid to prevent such things from happening to be the vandal…
A South Korean porcelain painter specializing in watercolor-like designs, managed to adapt her art to a whole new, more sensitive canvas, the human skin.
Bucheon-based tattoo artist Abii had spent about six years working as a professional porcelain painter when her mentor encouraged her to start practicing tattooing as well. She had always wanted to expand the way she expressed herself artistically, so this was a welcome challenge. She started studying under a famous South Korean tattoo artist, and before long, Abii was inking the same beautiful motifs from her porcelain masterpieces on human skin.
Brenda Delgado, a self-taught artist from Manila, in the Philippines, paints dead cockroaches into miniature artworks inspired by classics like Starry Night or Girl With a Pearl Earring.
When it comes to unusual art mediums, it’s tough to find something more bizarre than Brenda Delgado’s choice for a canvas. The 30-year-old resident of Caloocan City in Manila came up with the idea to paint on dead cockroaches while sweeping some dead bugs from her working space. She noticed how shiny and smooth cockroach wings were, paused, and somehow thought about painting on them. She started using oil paints to recreate tiny versions of classic masterpieces like Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, and her works soon started attracting attention online.
Danila Shmelev aka Shozy, is a talented street artist from Moscow, Russia who specializes in hyperrealistic optical illusions that capture the viewer’s imagination.
Born and raised in Moscow, Danila was first introduced to graffiti street culture in the early 2000s. Showing a strong talent for drawing and painting, he spent 4 years at the MHIP (Moscow Institute of Art & Industrial), while at the same time attending workshops of famous Russian painters. Still, graffiti remained Shozy’s biggest passion, and since 2010, he has been developing his unique style of street art, one that has won him international acclaim and the opportunity to travel the world to showcase his talent.
Albert Zakirov, an artist from the Russian Federation’s Tatarstan Autonomous Republic has an original, albeit controversial painting technique – he uses women’s naked bodies as his paintbrushes.
Albert Zakirov started drawing and painting at an early age and spent much of his childhood preparing for art school. After studying with an excellent teacher for a couple of months in tenth grade, he picked up the necessary knowledge to get admitted into art school, where he quietly studied the basics while experimenting with all sorts of unusual techniques and mediums. He never graduated from art school, but it was there that he first used a woman’s body to paint on canvas, and it was this experience that inspired him to make the technique his own.
A talented artist working under the pseudonym ‘Hirothropologie’ has become world-famous for his ability to create photo-like portraits using paint, brushes and lots of skill.
It might sound like an exaggeration, but having to distinguish between one of Hirothropologie’s paintings and an actual photo of his model is a very challenging endeavor. Every little detail in his paintings, from loose strands of hair to freckles or creases in his subjects’ clothes, are expertly reproduced on canvas, creating an almost eerie hyperrealistic illusion. It’s hard to believe Hirothropologie is able to achieve this with just paint and a set of fine brushes, but then again, as he puts it, “I put my entire life into this”.
Dmitry Bragin is a Ukrainian artist who specializes in steampunk masks that make the wearer look more machine than man.
While most of Dmitry Bragin’s stunning-looking masks aren’t technically steampunk, as they contain no moving parts, it’s clear that the sci-fi genre served as the main inspiration for them. The talented artist starts off with a flimsy plastic mask that’s easy to shape as his base and adds all sorts of decorative elements to it in order to transform it into the wearable wonders you see below. The materials in his arsenal range from motorcycle parts and discarded camera lenses to metallic children’s toys, although you couldn’t really tell by looking at the finished product.
