Evgen Bavcar, the Blind Photographer

It’s amazing sometimes, the amount of skill and versatility displayed by the visually challenged. Especially when they’re able to do certain things better than those with perfect vision. Photography, for instance.

If you’re wondering how it could ever be possible that a blind man take photographs, Evgen Bavcar has gone and done just that. In fact, he is a noted photographer, with his works being published and exhibited around the world. Bavcar, who was born in a small Slovenian town near Venice in 1946, met with two consecutive accidents that completely robbed him of his sight. This, before he even reached the age of twelve. Around four years after this incident, he happened to have access to a camera for the very first time. The first snap he ever took, was of a girl he loved. It was then that Bavcar realized that “I secretly discovered I could possess something that I could not see…”

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Artist Uses iPad to Create Detailed Celebrity Portraits

Long-gone are the days when painting was strictly done with specialized tools, like brushes, on canvases. Nowadays artists use anything from remote-controlled toy cars to Molotov cocktails to express their talents. So it should come to know surprise Kyle Lambert uses just one finger and the Apple iPad to create detailed celebrity portraits.

Kyle Lambert is a young English artist who specializes in portraits rendered using an iPad tablet and an $8 app, called Brushes. He only uses one finger as the brush, but judging by the detailed outcome, you’d think he has a whole set of professional tools and paints. Lambert starts out by sketching the basic facial proportions, drawing simple lines where the mouth, nose and eyes should be, making sure he gets the shape of the sitter’s head just right. It looks like the kind of sketch even I could do, but he says it’s the most important part of making a portrait, because it serves as the framework for the entire piece.

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Italian Sculptor Creates Miniature Colosseum from 10,000 Corks

61-year-old Ciro Califano, from Italy’s Nocera Inferiore, is one of the world’s most incredible artists, with the power to turn corks into beautiful works of art.

A former postal worker, who lived most his life traveling between Milan, Naples and Nocera, Ciro Califano has always had artistic ambitions. Even as a child, growing up in the Italian countryside, he always dreamed of exercising his talents and leaving his mark on the art world. And ten years ago, after his sons opened a local restaurant called “Cantina del Vescovo”(Bishop’s Cellar), he finally decided to exploit his gift as a sculptor. The fast accumulation of wine bottle corks was just the right pretext, and before he knew it, Ciro was creating cork miniature replicas of ancient wonders like the Roman aqueduct in Nimes, France, the Saracen Tower, the Church of Monte Albino, and many others.

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Awesome Joan of Arc Armor Made of Bicycle Tubes and Paper Mache

Did you ever find yourself wondering what Joan of Arc would have worn if she lived in modern times and rode a bicycle instead of a steed? Well, Grace Duval obviously did and she came up with an awe-inspiring upper-body armor made entirely of paper mache and bicycle inner tubes. Judging by how cool and detailed this thing looks, it’s clear the artist put a lot of work into this project, but the end result is simply incredible. I’ve see a lot of things made from tires, from crisis shoes to intricate sculptures, but this rubbery armor has to be the coolest thing yet. My hat’s off to Grace!

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Bold Designer Creates Fashionable Dress from Ford Focus Car Parts

A true designer can make a dress out of literally anything, even car parts! As a part of the month-long event celebrating 100 years of Ford in Britain, the company commissioned two young British designers to create a dress and jewelry fashioned from Ford components.

The unique ‘car dress’ was designed by Judy Clark, who is a nominee for Scottish designer of the year and has also worked with Alexander McQueen. She accepted the challenge to make the dress using Ford car parts within 1 week. The materials she worked with included various parts from a Ford Focus, along with Chiffon, Silk, Tweed, Lace, Leather and Spray paint. On her blog, Clark describes the entire designing and dress-making process from beginning to end. The parts first arrived at her place in big boxes. The components sent to her included keys, dashboard functions, rear lights, car seat covers, radio players, window buttons and more.

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The Beautiful Steampunk Cell Phones of Ivan Mavrovic

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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Talented Artist Recreates van Gogh Paintings with Spices and Food Coloring

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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Artist Makes Awesome Transformers Costumes from Household Goods

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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Extinct Bird Sculptures Made from Leftover Bones

Christy Rupp, an artist based in Chelsea, has created skeletons of extinct birds with the help of chicken bones that she collected over a period of time. Rupp describes herself as an ecological artist. She’s put up the sculptures for display at a museum called the “Extinct Birds Previously Consumed by Humans.” Her goal is to draw attention to the number of species we humans have driven to extinction.

“In our lifetime, more things have gone extinct than in all of the time before us,” she said. Rupp is a vegetarian, and collecting chicken bones wasn’t easy for her. She started by rummaging through garbage cans at parties and barbecues. She would literally wait for people to throw out food, and sometimes get kids to help her too. Sometimes, she would wait for her friends to finish their meal, asking for the carcass as soon as they were done. She even went as far as putting an ad in a local circulation, asking people to save bones for her.

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16-Year-Old Creates Dress from 4,000 Tea Bags

The latest in bizarre dresses has arrived. After paper napkins, newspapers, and even condoms, we now have a dress made of tea bags. This one was made by a 16-year-old from Kuala Lumpur, and she used a whopping 4,000 tea bags to create her masterpiece. She won the top prize at the Green Awards 2011 held in Kuala Lumpur in October.

Suraya Mohd Zairin is a science student from SMK Bukit Jelutong, Shah Alam. She says that she chose to make a dress out of tea bags because they were easily available to her. With the help of her friends, she was able to collect the 4,000 bags and then it took her three months to complete the dress. The theme followed by the budding designer was ‘flowers’, because their shapes have always mesmerized her.

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Week in Hell – Five Days Locked in a Hotel Room, Making Art

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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Tyree Callahan and His Amazing Chromatic Typewriter

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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English Artist Paints Using Remote-Controlled Toy Cars

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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Artist Uses Fire and Soot to Create Unique Masterpieces

A true artist can create art out of literally anything, even ashes. Steven Spazuk, a Canadian artist, is doing just this. Through his unique technique of burning paper and drawing on the soot, he creates breathtaking monochromatic images.

He has perfected his art form over ten years of practice. Spazuk uses candles and torch flame to partially burn thick pieces of paper. He then makes use of various tools to draw directly on the soot. A collection of burnt paper are gathered together to create the entire drawing. Spazuk says that he often works piece by piece, collecting a multitude of unique elements that he assembles into mosaics. “Entities that, once grouped together, afford a different meaning and provide a new perspective that is both novel and complementary,” he says. He mostly creates images of human faces or bodies, which contain a soulful element.

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Photocopied Portrait Recreated with 3.2 Million Dots

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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