The Covid-19 lockdowns have had a very different effect on people. While the boredom made some depressed, it actually helped others discover hidden talents. Take Anna Chojnicka, who started creating adorable banana peel artworks.

To pass the time and keep her creative juices flowing, social entrepreneur Anna Chojnicka started experimenting with banana peel oxidation as an art medium. Instead of doodling on canvas or paper, she decided to simply bruise bananas with thin, blunt objects and let oxidation do the rest. The bruised peel becomes darker as the hours go by, revealing the design etched into it.

Read More »

Turkish artist Deniz Sağdıç creates stunningly detailed portraits out of pieces of denim, using the different available shades of fabric to highlight even the tiniest details.

Deniz Sağdıç grew up surrounded by arts and crafts. Her father was a stained glass master, her uncle was a carpenter and a wood sculptor, her aunts worked as tailors, so she was exposed to art from a very early age. Ever since primary school, she spent a lot of time in her father’s workshop, helping him prepare the materials and cut his stained glass windows. She also spent a lot of time in her aunts’ tailor shop, discovering the secrets of the trade. So it didn’t really surprise anyone when the decided to go to art school.

Read More »

Inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic, French artist Gaetan Marron has confined himself to a transparent, 4m² plexiglass cube located inside a Marseille shopping mall for 20 days.

Titled “Non-Essentiel”, Gaetan Marron’s art performance is all about highlighting various issues caused by the lockdowns tied to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, like the lack of human interaction, the lack of freedom, and the role of so-called non-essential activities like culture and art. Earlier this month, the Marseille-based artist locked himself in a small, transparent plastic cube located inside the local Les Docks Villages shopping center, for a period of 20 days. Passers-by can see him, they can talk to him, and, most importantly, they can donate to him, as Marron depends on donations from his visitors for food.

Read More »

The Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India, is home to one of the most amazing wooden sculptures ever made – Mephistopheles and Margaretta, a double sculpture featuring two distinct characters on opposite sides.

Carved out of a single piece of Sycamore sometime in the 19th century, by an unknown French artist, Mephistopheles and Margaretta is not only the most photographed artwork displayed at Salar Jung Museum, but also one of the most recognizable images on the internet. Photos of this stunning sculptures have been doing the rounds on social media and capturing the imagination of millions around the world, for a very long time. And for good reason, the level of intricacy, and the binary design have remained unmatched in the last two centuries.

Read More »

Toronto-based art studio Falling in Sand specializes in detailed 2D and 3D sand artworks created by expertly layering colored sand in various transparent containers.

The story of Falling in Sand began in 2018 when artist James Sun started showcasing his early sand art on TikTok. His early work was far from perfect, but it was enough to attract attention and slowly build an audience. Today, the studio create all kinds of sand art, from portraits of celebrities and fictional characters, to beautiful sceneries, as well as custom commissions. They are all made by meticulously adding layers of colored sand on top of each other using a needle-like tool.

Read More »

Believe it or not, there was once a time when people exposed themselves to harmful levels of radiation to create uranium glass – detailed, fluorescent glassware that glowed a radioactive green under black light. Some antique collectors still live with them in their homes today.

As its name suggests, uranium glass is a special type of glass made with uranium oxide, which gives it a yellow or yellow-green tint, but also makes it radioactive and causes it to glow green under a UV black light. The proportion of uranium in this type of glass usually varies from trace levels to about 2 percent, although uranium glass made in the early twentieth century contained up to 25 percent uranium. Interestingly, the fluorescence of uranium glass is not related to its radioactivity, but is a chemical property of the uranium. In fact, uranium glass is considered generally safe to use, as long as you don’t use it constantly…

Read More »

Cookies come in all shapes and sizes, but few look as exquisite as those of Costa Rican confectioner Lorena Rodriguez, founder of Lorena’s Sweets.

Looking at the edible works of art created by Lorena Rodriguez, once doesn’t know if to eat them or hang them up on a wall somewhere, for everyone to see. Some of the experienced confectioner’s cookies certainly don’t look like the variety you find in most cookie jars, that’s for sure. They range from realistic-looking paintings with elaborate, gilded frames, designs inspired by rococo architecture, and edible Christmas decorations. They consist of a Danish-style cookie expertly decorated with a high-quality fondant molded into shape using silicone molds.

Read More »

Japanese self-taught artist Rito (@lito_leafart) spends hours painstakingly carving tree leaves to create stunningly detailed scenes that capture viewers’ imagination.

Rito’s leaf cutouts are impressive enough by themselves, but the story of what inspired the artist to take up leaf art in the first place makes them even more so. Apparently, the Japanese artist suffers from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), and spending hours focusing on a single artwork was his ways of treating his condition. He has been creating at least one of his leaf cutouts a day, as a form of therapy.

Read More »

Would you ever sell your face? If the answer is yes, there is a Japanese company that wants to hear from you. It’s in the business of buying the rights to people’s faces so it can sell them in the form of hyper-realistic 3D-printed masks.

Ever since Kamenya Omoto, a Tokyo-based specialty mask maker and store, announced its intention to buy the rights to people’s faces for 40,000 yen ($380) a pop, it’s been overwhelmed with offers. The company wants to reproduce people’s faces in the form of hyper-realistic masks and sell them for an estimated ($940). If a mask proves popular with clients, the person whose appearance inspired it stands to earn a percentage of the profits as well. The controversial project, named “That Face”, reportedly aims to give a sci-fi twist to the idea of buying and selling faces.

Read More »

Tal Peleg is an experienced makeup artist who goes beyond the usual tricks of the trade to create beautiful artworks in the space between her eyebrows and her eyes.

They say makeup itself is an art form, but if that’s true, what do we even call what Israeli Tal Peleg does, magic? The talented makeup artist uses both standard makeup and watercolors to create all sorts of intricate scenes – from iconic film or cartoon scenes, to original designs – on her own eyes, using very thin paint brushes. The 34-year-old artist takes between 1.5 hours and 4.5 hours (2.5 hours on average) to complete on of her amazing eye artworks, depending on the level of complexity.

Read More »

Japanese designer Yasuhiro Suziki has created a unique boat shaped like a giant zipper puller that looks like it’s opening up the water when sailing.

Unveiled as part of the Designart Tokyo 2020 event, the zipper puller boat – officially known as ‘Zipper Fastener Ship’ – is the brain child of Japanese designer Yasuhiro Suzuki, who claims it was the result of a simple observation. He was looking down from the window of an airplane and saw a ship sailing through Tokyo Bay; the movement of the water as the boat passed created the illusion of a zipper splitting the water, just like one opens a jacket, so he decided to create a literal representation of this illusion.

Read More »

Hungarian artist Peter Szucsy has a very unusual yet fascinating hobby – he assembles all kinds of mechanical parts from vintage watches, cameras, and medical equipment into intricate steampunk spider sculptures.

Peter Szucsy has worked as an art director, creating all kinds of virtual creatures and monsters for video games, but one day he decided to start bringing some of these figments of his imagination into the real world as well. Every week, he heads to a flea market near his home in Budapest, where he looks for all kinds of vintage mechanical parts he can use to create his menagerie of steampunk spiders.

Read More »

Whether you’re looking to stand out from the crowd at rave parties, or just keep your love for tattoos a secret from the world at large, UV tattoos are definitely something to consider.

Although they’ve been around for many years now, UV tattoos, also known as black light tattoos, have been growing in popularity, both among club goers craving attention, and tattoo lovers wanting to make their traditional ink stand out in certain conditions. And then there is the third category, the people who want to keep their ink virtually invisible in their day to day life, only to showcase it in all its glory under ultraviolet light. Whatever the case, there are a few interesting things you should know about this intriguing tattoos.

Read More »

Who would have though that simply painting a mural on the side of a building would one day have the same pollution-cleaning effect as planting 780 trees?

Organized by the sportswear company Converse as part of their City-Forests campaign, the latest mural in the Polish city of Warsaw is not only an aesthetically pleasing artwork, but also an ingenious way to tackle urban pollution. Painted using photocatalytic paint with titanium dioxide, on a building that faces the busy metro station Politechnika, the ingenious mural reportedly attracts airborne pollutants before converting them into harmless nitrates through a chemical process involving sunlight.

Read More »

Mexican artist Amadeus Garuda combines his passion for plasticine modeling and his love of all things geek to create some of the most stunning sculptures we’ve ever seen.

Amadeus, who goes by Dr. Garuda on social media, is a truly multitalented artist. He starts out by drawing a detailed sketch of his chosen character, in the particular pose he plans on recreating. He then start work on the metal wire frame of the sculpture itself, setting it over the sketch multiple times, to make sure it is correctly bent in the right places. Next, he crumples aluminum foil on the frame, and starts applying strips of red modelling clay. Using only his fingers, a scalpel and a cylindrical rod, he molds the clay into stunningly detailed anatomical parts, creased fabric, armor, and more.

Read More »