Rainbow Eucalyptus – Nature’s Painted Tree

It might look like someone painted these by hand, but the only artist responsible for these living works of art, is Mother Nature.

The incredible looking Rainbow Eucalyptus is the only species of eucalyptus that grows in the northern hemisphere. It can grow to impressive heights, of up to 70 meters, and it is normally grown for its pulpwood, used to create white paper. There are many other interesting facts regarding Rainbow Eucalyptus, but the obvious question arises: why does it look like it’s been painted?

The secret behind the Rainbow Eucalyptus is actually pretty simple. The trees shed multiple patches of bark every year, but not at the same time. As the patches are gone, the green inner bark is exposed, and, as it matures, every new patch first turns bluish, then orange, purple and maroon. This creates the rainbow effect that makes these trees so nice to look at.

Rainbow Eucalyptus can be found in New Guinea, New Britain and the Philippines.

via Kuriositas

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Doug Landis’ Mouth Art

True talent and artistic calling can’t be contained even by the most severe physical handicaps, and Doug Landis is the perfect example. Using only his mouth, Doug creates some really extraordinary artworks.

Doug Landis was paralyzed from the neck down, after an awful accident, during a high-school wrestling match. The before over-active kid, too busy to pick up a pen and draw, discovered his talent when he saw the drawing of a house, on a Christmas card, and thought he could do it himself. He redid the drawing a few times, until he developed his own style.

Using his neck to guide the pen across a sheet of paper, Doug has created a series of drawings that earned him a number of awards, at the shows and exhibits he attended. Each artwork takes the artist between 40 and 200 hours of work, depending on the size of the project. For his famous “Vanishing Breeds”, the artist imagined his work drawn by hand, then watched photos and videos of the animals, in order to see the fur and muscles, and only then began the actual drawing. Just like Peter Longstaff , the foot painter, he is a member of the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists Association.

To learn more about Doug Landis’ amazing mouth art, and purchase some of his artworks, check out his official site, www.mouthart.com.

Photos are copyright of DOUG LANDIS

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Lisa Black’s Steampunk Taxidermy

You have probably seen taxidermy and steampunk art before, but have you ever seen them combined?

Lisa Black, a talented young artist from New Zealand, creates the most amazing works of art, by adding cool steampunk elements, like gears, screws, and other metal pieces, to taxidermy animals. This unusual combination creates unique art pieces that are absolutely amazing.

Check out her portfolio at Behance.net

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Christmas Has a Festive Tree, So Why Not Easter?

It makes sense doesn’t it? Easter is a major Christian holiday too, so it should have its own version of the popular Christmas Tree.

Strangely enough, such a thing as an Easter tree already exists, and it can be found in Germany. Around 1945, when he was just a young boy, Volker Kraft saw his very first Easter Tree (Eierbaum, Osterbaum or Ostereirbaum, in German), and decided he would have one of his very own, when he grew up. Time passed and young Volker became a married man, with a family and everything. But his childhood dream stuck with him and he decorated his first Easter Tree, in 1965. He used 18 colored plastic eggs.

But the tree was growing fast and he and his wife, Christa couldn’t afford to waste so many Easter eggs. So they began drilling holes into the eggs, using the contents in the kitchen, and the painted shells as decorations. When their children grew up, they started helping with the decorating,and the Easter Tree became a family tradition, known not only in their home town of Saalfeld, but all of Germany.

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Dress Made from One Million Meters of Human Hair Showcased in Vietnam

A unique tunic-like dress, made out of countless human hairs, was presented by a model, in the center of Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.

Human hair appears to be a popular material fro Asian artists. After a Chinese hairdresser recreated Tiananmen Square out of human square, and made a hair sculpture of Barrack Obama, Kim Do, a Vietnamese hairdresser creates a tunic made from hair.

Material for the dress was gathered from 54 different people across Vietnam, including popular local artists like Le Dung, Thanh Lam, Hong Nhung or Ha Kieu Anh. The 1 million meters of hair were then died and sewn into a dress, using a needle. On the front side of this unusual garment, you can see the shape of a dragon, made from long brown hair.

Kim Do’s hair dress comes with a hat, also made from hair and decorated with the design of Vietnam’s Turtle Tower.

via 24h.com.vn

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Boardroom Table Made of LEGO Bricks

We’ve featured a large variety of stuff made out of LEGO bricks, but this is the first LEGO boardroom table I’ve ever seen.

The newly formed Boys and Girls advertising agency asked the guys at abcg to transform a gorgeous Georgian house into a worthy headquarters. The new place had to be playful, but not juvenile. With that in mind, the designers made the bold move of creating the boardroom table out of LEGO pieces. It took a total of 22,742 LEGO bricks to complete the 1.2 x 2.7 table, but the end result was more than satisfying.

The LEGO bricks that form the boardroom table are stuck together the old fashioned way, without the use of glue. The pieces are set on a slate of steel and covered by a 10 mm-thick layer of toughened glass.

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The Real Life Paintings of Alexa Meade

All of Alexa Meade’s artistic creations look like they’ve just escaped from a famous painting and are trying to fond their place in the real world. One of the best body-painters in the world, Alexa Meade uses acrylic paint to make her subjects look like real-life paintings.

I know it’s hard to believe, but these are indeed just photographs, not paintings. Ms. Meade skilfully applies acrylic paint onto the subjects and their backgrounds, creating the illusion of a painting. It’s not until the subjects appear in real-life settings that you realize they’re actually real people.

Check out more of Alexa Meade’s real life paintings on her website and flickr stream.

Photos are copyright of ALEXA MEADE

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Elephant Dung Stilettos Prove Fashion Stinks

Featuring a 10-inch tall platform, made out of elephant poop, these crazy stilettos stink, for real.

Created by London-based designer, INSA, the elephant dung shoes are a response to the famous work of Chris Ofili, who used elephant dung in all of his paintings. INSA retraced Ofili’s footsteps, from over 15 years ago, and used dung from the same family of elephants Ofili preferred. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about dung taken directly off the ground and slapped on the shoes.The material is treated to avoid putrefaction.

If you thought those hoof-shaped shoes were weird, I’d love to hear your thoughts on these elephant dung stilettos. I wonder if they still stink, though…

via designboom

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Old Printed Circuit Boards Turned into Sculptures

Printed circuit boards (PCB) are one of the biggest environment threats of our time, and recycling them, instead of dumping them in a landfill, should be a top priority.

Artist Steven Rodrig took PCB recycling to another level, when he created a series of sculptures made entirely from circuit boards and other electronic parts. His collection includes a series of pieces he calls “Organic Life Forms” that depict various insects, animals and plants.

Very Similar to the ASUS Motherboard Mona Lisa, Steven Rodrig’s entire PCB art collection can be admired at xactstudios.

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James Kuhn – The Rembrandt of Face Painting

46-year-old James Kuhn uses his face  as canvas, to create some of the most eccentric face-paintings you’ve ever seen.

Kuhn says he has always been an artist, drawing in his oatmeal, as a child, but found his passion for face-painting, one day when he was snowed in, and couldn’t get to work. He is famous for taking on a project that implied drawing a different thing on his face, every day, for an entire year.

His “self-portraits” include different animals, foods, cartoon characters and pretty much anything you can think of. Kuhn himself admits he is addicted to face painting, always thinking about what his next design will be.

Because he found the first 365 project fun James Kuh decided to go through it one more time. You can track his progress and check out the rest of his rich face-painting portfolio on his Flickr stream.

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Reborn Babies Are so Realistic It’s Scary

Glenda Ewart, a very talented artist, from Castlerock, Ireland, creates hyper-realistic dolls of newborn babies.

A former chef, Glenda Ewart discovered her talent as her doll-sculpting artist while she was pregnant with her first child. Now she creates realistic baby dolls, using multiple coats of paint, to recreate a newborn’s soft skin. After the skin is cured in the oven, the most strenuous part begins: implanting over 20,000 fine strands of mohair into the doll’s scalp. While others might find this process difficult, to say the least, Glenda Ewart says she loves every moment of it.

You know how most parents say babies grow up too fast,and they wish they could somehow keep them young and adorable forever? Glenda Ewart’s reborn babies are the closest thing to fulfilling this dream, and she sells her creations to parents all around the world. She spends a long time working on each and every one of them, specifically because she tries to make all of them unique.

Panting the dolls, implanting the hair and scenting them to smell just like newborn can take several weeks for just one baby, but Glenda Ewart enjoys making every one unique. You can witness her incredible talent, in the photos below, but make sure you check out her official site, for more information and details. Also check her Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Photos are copyright of GLENDA EWART and YELLOW COTTAGE NURSERY

 

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The Easter Egg Celebrities of John Lamouranne

John Lamouranne, also known as The Egg Man, has been creating celebrity egg sculptures, for over 30 years.

His career as The Egg Man begain 1978, when, during an Easter vacation to Disney World, John Lamouranne was inspired to paint a Disney character, on an egg, for his daughter. At first, he painted one egg sculptures, but after a dream, in which he himself was a tiny egg man, he began using more than one egg for his artworks.

The 63-year-old artist, from New Orleans, uses wooden or ceramic eggs for the bodies of his celebrity sculptures, and hollowed goose eggs for their heads. When needed, he builds entire sets for his creations. John Lamouranne charges between $37 and $300, and can be bought through the artist’s website, or on sites like eBay.

Photos by JEFF MOORE PHOTO via Telegraph.co.uk

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Vipula Athukorale’s Intricate Butter Sculptures

46-year old Vipula Athukorale spends tens of hours creating some of the most intricate food-art masterpieces in the world.

Mr. Athukorale has worked, as a chef, in high ranking restaurants in Grece, Cyprus, Bahrain, Iraq and England, creating amazing works of edible art, out of butter. Actually, he uses pastry margarine, but “margarine sculptures” doesn’t roll as smoothly off the tongue. This fancy chef won two gold medals and a silver one, at the international Salon Culinaire Awards, in London, last week , for his detailed Rolls Royce, and scenes from Pinocchio and Pied Piper stories.

According to the artist, the Rolls Royce took around 90 hours to complete, and features detailed interior and underside. In order to get everything right, Vipula Athukorale doesn’t even breathe, when sculpting margarine. To keep his hands from shaking, he leans in toward the artwork, takes a deep breath, does some sculpting, then leans back and breathes out. He also washes his hands in ice-cold water, to prevent his hot fingers from damaging the artwork.

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Fairytale Urban Art Spotted in the Ukraine

It’s amazing how many incredible artistic wonders go unnoticed, simply because they’re so well hidden that no one knows about them.

This particular artwork is set up at the 13th floor of an Ukrainian apartment building, in Kiev. It’s really hard to describe, and even looking at the amazing photos below, it’s hard to understand the meaning of this installation. The man who took the photos described it as the entrance to a fairytale land, that made him feel like he didn’t belong there. So he just quickly took some photos and quickly got out of there.

To protect the tenants of this Kiev building from some unwanted attention, the photograph didn’t reveal the address of this abstract masterpiece. Intricate colorful moulds cover the walls of this 13th floor, from floor to ceiling, and  the light coming from the ceiling windows creates a truly fantastic atmosphere.

via holy-mozart

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Cheesy Steve Jobs

Calm down Apple fanboys, I’m not calling your venerable hero cheesy. It’s just that what else are you going to call the head of Steve Jobs, made of Mozzarella cheese?

An able cook, who also happens to be an avid Apple fanboy, decided to show his appreciation for the “greatest consumer electronics company of all times”, by making the head of its leader, Steve Jobs, out of Mozzarella.

I have to say the cook made great use of only cheese and pepper, to create a very detailed image of Steve Jobs. He’s going to serve Steve Jobs’ Mozzarella head at an iPad Launch Party. If you want to do the same, head over to The Cook’s Den, for detailed instructions on how to make your own.

Steve-Jobs-head

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