Gravity Glue – Michael Grab’s Gravity Defying Rock Balancing Art

Artist Michael Grab is a master of rock balancing – he can pile them up in all sorts of gravity-defying formations, and believe it or not, there’s no glue involved.

Michael calls his art a ‘contemplative stone arrangement’ that involves ‘patience, adaptation, slow-breathing, steady hands and a plethora of other practiced skills’. His project, called ‘Gravity Glue’, has him balancing rocks of all shapes and capturing the impossible-looking structures on camera.

Gravity-Glue

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Jon Neill Creates the Most Amazing Pumpkin Carvings You’ve Ever Seen

Hollywood artist Jon Neill’s pumpkin carvings are so scary they might just give you nightmares this Halloween. The big, wrinkly faces and mouths full of crooked teeth are so life-like and rich in detail that it’s hard to believe they’re actually made of plain old pumpkins.

Neill, originally from Kansas City, has been carving pumpkins ever since he was a boy. His family used to grow them, and over the years, his traditional jack-o-lanterns morphed into creepy works of art. But his skills didn’t receive recognition until a few years ago, when the San Fernando Valley resident turned pro. He auditioned for the TV show Halloween Wars as a pumpkin artist, for which he made a few time-lapse videos of himself at work. When one of those videos was put up on YouTube, it started to receive thousands of hits, and he soon became known as one of the world’s best pumpkin carving artists.

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Tetrachromat Artist Can See 100 Times More Colors Than an Average Human

Apparently, there’s much more to a pink flower than meets the eye – there’s also gold, orange, yellow, purple, blue and red.How do we know this? Well, it’s all thanks to tetrachromats like Concetta Antico. Her unique condition enables her to see 100 times more color than the average person.

“My world speaks to me very strongly and then I can’t wait to paint it,” said Concetta, an artist based in San Diego. “I’ve been told that you see gray, mostly, in a shadow. Well, shadows are fabulous. I see emerald greens, I see magentas, I see lilacs, I see blues.”

The reason for Concetta’s amazing ability to see the world from a different perspective is the extra receptors in her eyes. Most people have three types of cones – structures in the eye that are designed to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain – in their eyes. But tetrachromats like Concetta have four cones, so while the average person can only see 1 million colors, they can potentially view 99 million!

Concetta-Antico

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This Makeup Artist’s Incredible Transformations Will Blow Your Mind

Lucia Pittalis, an Italian makeup artist and portrait painter, is a master of disguise – she can give herself a whole new identity with just a few strokes of makeup. All she needs are a few cosmetics, makeup tools, and wigs. The 43-year-old mostly chooses to turn herself into famous musicians, actors and fictional characters – both male and female.

Some of Lucia’s most epic transformations have been into iconic figures such as Marlon Brando, Walter White, and Bette Davis. She has also morphed into pop icons like Iggy Azalea, and movie characters like Rambo, Rocky, and Don Vito Corleone.

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Artist Uses Sharpie to Transform Husband’s Skyline GTR into an Artistic Masterpiece on Wheels

You don’t really need to spend thousands of dollars on Swarovski crystals or hair extensions to give your car a neat makeover. An inexpensive Sharpie can do the job just as well, if you’re creative enough. Like this woman who used dozens of Sharpies and put in 100 hours of hard work to convert her husband’s 1995 Nissan Skyline GTR into a mind-blowing piece of art.

Collen Kelton, a US military officer stationed in Japan, had always hated the dull silver color of his R33 GTR. So he told his then-girlfriend Allison that she could doodle a few scratches on the bumper. But when he saw how beautiful her designs looked, he was compelled to ask her to keep going.

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Philippines-Based Artist Harnesses the Power of the Sun to Create Amazing Pyrography Masterpieces

Artist Jordan Mang-osan is a master of pyrography – an incredibly rare and beautiful artform that involves decorating slabs of wood with burn marks. While most other pyrography artists prefer to use specialized tools, Jordan prefers to harness the power of the sun with the help of a magnifying glass. Jordan uses the special technique to create beautiful landscapes and portraits on wood.

To create a piece, he starts off by sketching a design on to a piece of wood. He then uses a magnifying glass to concentrate solar heat on selected areas of the artwork. The heat etches permanent darkened lines into the wood, so intricate that it’s hard to imagine the artist’s hands never really touch the wooden canvas. The work is tedious, however – it takes several months of dedicated effort to manipulate the sun’s rays and etch each detail of the complex pieces.

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This Life-Size Hulk Statue Made Entirely of Discarded Nuts and Bolts Is the Coolest Thing You’ll See Today

Ban Hun Lek is a Thai scrap metal art company that makes amazing pop culture sculptures from discarded auto parts. One of their best works is this Incredible Hulk statue made almost entirely out of rusty old nuts and bolts.

According to the brand’s website, Ban Hun Lek is a family-run business, specializing in hand-made scrap metal art that’s created piece-by-piece from used auto parts that have no value. “Bolts, nuts, screws, spark plugs, and other used auto parts have been re-created by our skillful welders with just a normal electric welding technique,” they wrote. “These art would make great gifts, and are great for collection and decoration.”

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Talented Artist Creates Incredible Optical Illusions on Wood

Singaporean artist Ivan Hoo is an ace at creating optical illusions. Using pastels and pencils on wood, he illustrates highly realistic objects such as spilled cola, cracked eggs, broken vases and crumpled paper. It all looks three-dimensional until you touch it and realise that it’s not.

Ivan said that he chose to work with wood because of its texture and the way it holds color. “By working on wood, it gives me a lot of dimension and ideas to create something close to reality and it works really well with pastels too,” he explained.

“I started to experiment on wood some years back with mainly portraits as my subject before going further with a different concept,” he added. “I started to think of ideas and draw things that we could see ‘happening’ on a piece of wood, so the very first idea that struck me was the dripping effect. That was my first anamorphic work.”

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Indonesian Workshop Creates Mind-Blowing Life-Size Replicas of Popular Sports Cars Exclusively Out of Wood

This group of highly skilled Indonesian woodworkers caters exclusively to people who love collecting sports cars – both real and wooden. They carve impressive life-size replicas of popular sports car models, and their creations are routinely exported to buyers in the US, England, Germany, and other European countries. 

Their latest handiwork is a model of the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, made entirely out of teak – it doesn’t work of course, but it’s a stunning copy of the real thing. And let’s not forget – cheaper by several thousands of dollars.

wooden-Bugatti-Veyron

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Awesome Pixelated Portraits Made with Thousands of Expertly Arranged Paint Swatches

Peter Combe is a San Francisco-based visual artist who specializes in creating three-dimensional artwork using nothing but paint swatches, hand-punched into small disks. Using his special technique, Combe creates stunning pieces that range from abstract pattern-based compositions to highly realistic pixelated portraits with a vintage photograph-like quality.

Combe has a huge collection of paint swatch disks of over 1,100 colors that he has organized based on tonal increments and light-reflecting values. This enables him to think of tones rather than colors while working. To create a piece, he fits these disks into bezel-cut grooves on a specially prepared archival material, with the aid of a vintage operating-theater lamp.

Peter-Combe-portraits

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Multimedia Artist Creates Portrait of Nikola Tesla Using Electricity

To pay tribute to Serbian inventor and electrical engineering genius Nikola Tesla, artist Phil Hansen recently created a portrait of him using only electric sparks.

A time lapse video of Hansen creating the painting shows him connecting a couple of wires to a large battery. He then brings the two naked ends of the wire together to produce sparks. He uses the sparks to create burn marks of varying darkness on paper, creating the eyes, nose and other features of Tesla’s face until the mind-blowing portrait is complete.

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Artist Draws Detailed Portraits Using Only a Typewriter

While most graphic designers use high-tech software to create images, Álvaro Franca has chosen to return to the basics. Using a vintage typewriter, he creates incredibly detailed portraits of his favorite authors.

Franca begins the process by creating a reference image on his computer. This allows him to plan out the areas of light and dark shading on the portrait. Once the reference is ready, he uses it as a guide and proceeds to choose the letters and the number of strikes he needs to achieve the desired level of darkness.

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Japanese Artist Creates Amazingly Realistic Miniature Dioramas

Satoshi Araki, an artist from Tokyo, creates highly realistic miniature models of towns, vehicles, and a lot of other objects from everyday life. He is particularly skilled at making small-scale dioramas of chaotic cityscapes that are affected by urban decay, pollution, or warfare.

Satoshi mostly uses styrofoam board to make these incredibly intricate and complex models – he cuts them down to the desired shape and size, paints them, and then glues them together. He explains on his blog that he uses Google Image Search to pull up images that he later uses as a visual reference. These images help him create scenes that are very life-like, down to the smallest detail.

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Retired Teacher Spends 60 Years Folding over 10,000 Paper Planes of All Shapes and Sizes

Xu Shuquan, a retired primary school teacher from Chengdu city in Sichuan Province, has dedicated the past 60 years to folding paper planes. The 70-year-old now has a collection of 10,000 planes of different sizes, colors and shapes, in addition to various paper dolls and models of the 12 zodiac signs.

What’s so great about a grown man making paper planes, you ask? Well, Xu’s planes aren’t like those simple ones that kids make. He uses a complicated ancient origami-like folding technique called ‘Zhezhi’ to make a variety of aircraft models – from jumbo jets to fighter planes.

Chinese-paper-folding

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Meet the Twilight Fan Who Married a Cut-Out of Robert Pattinson

Like many girls her age, 25-year-old Lauren Adkins has a huge crush on vampire Edward Cullen from the Twilight movies, played by Hollywood heartthrob Robert Pattinson. But Lauren has taken her infatuation to a whole new level – she actually got married to a life-size cardboard cut-out of her perfect man. She lives with the cut-out, goes on dates with it, and pretty much considers it her partner for life.

Lauren, from Las Vegas, said that she’s been obsessed with romantic fairytale endings ever since she was a little girl. “When I was a child, I watched the Disney versions of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella until the tapes wore out,” she recalled. As she grew older, her interests shifted towards romantic teen movies, like Twilight.

After every guy she met and dated at college failed to meet her ideal of Prince Charming, she finally found what she was looking for in Edward Cullen. “It was different from any love story I’d ever seen before – after all, the leading character was as likely to suck your blood as open the door for you. I was obsessed.”

lauren-adkins-cullen

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