Chimera Fetus Is the Perfect Bizarre Gift

Missmonster, a talented freelance artist with a taste for the bizarre, has created a series of fetal chimeras that you can buy as presents for your quirky friends.

Melita Curphy, better known as Missmonster, creates the most amazing things, from weird dolls, to cool pendants, masks and even awesome clothing accessories. Her latest creation will probably shock some of you, but bare in mind they are only sculptures, despite their very realistic veiny look.

You’r e probably wondering why anyone would want to buy a chimera fetus, but I’m sure there are plenty of oddballs like me out there who find this pretty damn cool. Missmonster’s fetuses are 4’5″ in size and come with beautiful wooden boxes, bearing the wax seal of Ada Rotsbeest, a fictional character created by the artist. Read More »

The Creepy Art of Seiko Kato

Perhaps a bit to eerie and strange for the average fellow, Seiko Kato‘s Victorian dolls are just what the doctor ordered for a bizarre-lover like me.

Seiko Kato, from Brighton, England, is an artist and illustrator who finds inspiration in old Victorian medical books, Victorian books and encyclopedias, and Victorian paraphernalia. At fist glance, her dolls look like the kind you’d expect to find in your grandmother’s room, but a closer look reveals some rather bizarre augmentations. Seiko Kato adds various steampunk elements to give her creations a unique look.

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Toastman and His Crunchy Toast Art

New-Zealander Maurice Bennet, also known  as “Toastman”, creates incredible portraits and abstract works of art using toast.

Born in Paeroa, in the late 1950s, Maurice Bennett has always been fascinated by the art world, and as a young man, he traveled the world visiting museums and art galleries learning more and more about traditional and offbeat art. Upon his return to New-Zealand, the starving artist had to find a job, rather than focus on his art career, so he began weighing potatoes at a local market. Before he knew it, he and his wife were owning their own supermarket, and he was able to express himself through art.

Maurice’s first artistic experiences had him painting and sculpting, but it wasn’t until he discovered toast as an art medium, that he became a truly fulfilled artist. Throughout the years he created portraits of famous figures such as New Zealand prime minister John Key, rugby legend Jonah Lomu, the Mona Lisa, Elvis Presley , all of which earned him the praise of art critics.

Some of his more recent creations include a portrait of American president Barrack Obama, and some abstract works inspired by Maori carvings and Pacific patterns. he even made a portrait of rap star Eminem out thousands of M&Ms.

After selling his successful business, in late 2009, Toastman Maurice Bennett is now free to dedicate himself to his family, and his offbeat art.

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Chinese Artist Carves Football Players on Eggs

Wang Huaping, a Chinese artist and huge fan of football, has found a unique to celebrate the World Cup 2010. Using a fine chisel, he managed to carve the faces of famous football players on eggs.

Wang Huaping has so far carved hundreds of eggs, and is an established artist in his home city of Tianjin. Now he has extended his collection of artworks with the portraits of famous football players like Lionel Messi, David Beckham, or David Villa. He has also carved the logos and mascots of the 2010 Football World Cup.

No info about the actual carving, but this man must have a real gentle touch, if he can keep from cracking the eggs with that chisel.

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Artist Uses 200,000 Ants to Create Unique Painting

Painter Chris Trueman, from Claremont, California, has created a unique painting by using 200,000 dead ants instead of paint.

The painting Chris calls “Self Portrait With a Gun” actually features his younger brother, dressed as a cowboy, holding his dad’s rifle. From afar this unusual artwork looks more like an old yellowed photo, but as you approach it, you realize it’s actually something completely different – a painting made of ants.

To the artist, this bizarre ant painting represents how humans learn about things abstractly, only to have their impressions changed as they get closer to them. But actually completing his masterpiece wasn’t the simplest task, mostly because he hated killing the creatures he perceives to be ” right on the line of what I consider intelligent life.” When he first began the project, he decided to catch the ants himself, but the ants in San Francisco, where he was living at the time, were too small. So he decided to order them online, from a guy who was breeding and selling them as food for lizards.

First he ordered just 1,000 ants, because he didn’t know how many he would need for the right density, but then he started ordering 40,000. They came in peanut-butter jars, and seeing them moving around in there, it was hard for Chris to make a decision. He couldn’t release them, because they weren’t native to that area, and they could start biting people. So he decided to kill the ants himself. It wasn’t easy, and he even took a 1-year-break, but decided to complete his ant masterpiece,  because he didn’t want the first batch to have died in vain.

Some of the ants dried up and were torn to pieces, so Chris Trueman used them in the large parts of the painting, where details weren’t important, saving the full-sized ants for the detailed parts. he would handle them with tweezers, placing them on the Plexiglass canvas and coat them in a painting resin called galkyd.

Chris Trueman‘s ant painting is on display, at an art gallery in San Diego, and is priced at $35,000.

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Famous Artworks Made with Thousands of Thread Spools

Fascinated by art, science, technology, and the link between the three, Devorah Sperber uses thousands of spools of thread to recreate pixelated, inverted images of masterpieces, which look like colorful abstractions, from up close.

You must be wondering why the New York based artist uses inverted images, in her art. As I said before, she is interested in science and art alike, and she is trying to address the way our brain perceives visual information versus the way most of us think we see. By hanging thousands of colorful thread spools upside down, she is referencing that our eye lenses project an inverted image of our surroundings onto the retina, which is then corrected by our brain.

In Devorah Sperber’s art, the brain is represented by a clear acrylic sphere that not only inverts the spool artworks, but also focuses in on them, so they look like sharp reproductions of original paintings. Most of her masterpieces are made out of around 5,000 spools of thread, and take between one and six months to complete.

via Yatzer

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Ju Duoqi – The Queen of Vegetable Art

Using vegetables of all shapes and sizes, Chinese artist, Ju Duoqi, recreates famous masterpieces, like The Last Supper, or Mona Lisa.

Ju Duoqi first started working with vegetables in the summer of 2006, when she spent two days peeling a few kilograms of peas, before stringing them on a wire and transforming them in a skirt, a top, a headdress and a magic wand. This was her first experience with vegetable art, and it was called Pea Beauty Pageant.

In the years that followed, Ju Duoqi spent a lot of her time going to the vegetable market, picking them up and placed them in different positions, to see which ones made them more interesting. She discovered the different colors and textures of vegetables offered a rich source of imagery. And frying, boiling, drying, pickling or letting them rot made them even more interesting. The artist realized she no longer needed models for her artworks, as the vegetables could easily be used as models and props alike.

The Chinese artist decided to restage La Liberte Guidant le Peuple, using only vegetables, and called it La Liberte Guidant les Legumes. She used rotting ketchup for blood, potatoes as soldiers and rotting vegetables as background. She went on to create the vegetable art masterpieces you see below.

Ju Duoqi hardly ever leaves her home, and when she does she rarely travels for over 15 km, so she created her vegetable art for all women who love their home. She considers it an environmental way of bringing art and life together.

via ParisBeijing Photo Gallery

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Motherboard Stained Glass Window Is Fit for a Geek Church

Remember those cool Transformer stained glass windows we featured, a while back? Well, the idea of unusual stained glass seems to have caught on pretty well, as people are coming up with the most interesting ideas.

The latest example is a stonemason, named Dan, who used some old motherboards, donated by a friend, to create a really cool stained glass window. He actually used his creation on one of his projects, integrating the motherboard stained glass in a sandstone tracery window. Apparently, it has a “good vs. evil” theme going on.

via Overclockers.com.au

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Embroidered Bread – The Latest Trend in Food Art

It may seem strange, but embroidered Wonder Bread can be used as regular paintings, as it can last for years.

Catherine McEver is well known in the odd art world, particularly for her Wonder Bread creations. Her latest artworks are embroidered slices of Wonder Bread that look like famous paintings (Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, for example). They might look silly, but these things are pretty difficult to make, considering how fragile Wonder Bread is. Just like paintings, these Embroidered slices can be hung on a wall,  and will last for years.

Check out more of Catherine’s bizarre artworks on her blog, StuffYouCantHave.

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Make Art, Not War

I guess it’s true what they say, guns really don’t kill people, they can actually be used to create original works of art.

Come May 21, The Rusian city of Perm will be hosting an important exhibition of modern Ukrainian art, called YAKSCHO. It aims to reflect the situation in this country: productively unstable, full of contradictions, promises, hopes and disappointments, bursts of protest and creative energy.

One of the most interesting displays at YAKSCHO will definitely be the shot-up BMW. A local shooters group was asked by the Museum of Modern Art, in Perm, to take part in an unusual, but fun shooting session. Participants were promised a BMW X5 to shoot at, but in the end they were happy to empty their guns into an older model.

Volodymyr Kuznetzov, the man behind this unusual art project, decorated the car with flowers and other ornaments, marked with nail polish crosses, but the shooters, weren’t really able to follow the pattern. Still he was pleased with the final result and believes his shot-up BMW will be a hit when the exhibition opens.

via ilipin

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The Art of Bones, by Francois Robert

Francois Robert creates iconic shapes, using dozens of real human bones. He spends entire days on his knees, but the results are truly exceptional.

Francois has always been fascinated by skeletons, but it wasn’t until a day, in the mid 1990s, that he came face to face with one. He was at a yard sale, in Michigan, checking out some desks, for his office. He stumbled across three, two of which were empty,m and the third, with a complete human skeleton, inside. He took them all to his studio.

In 2007, as the recession began to think its teeth into the economy, Mr. Robert had so much time on his hands that he decided to turn to the skeleton in his closet. Because its parts were wired together, for educational purposes, the artist decided he needed one that could be broken down into pieces. So he traded his skeleton, for a box filled with 206 real human bones.

Since then, Francois Robert has been spending most of his days, on his knees, arranging even the tiniest bones into the right position, for the perfect shot. His collection is called “Stop the Violence”, and it was inspired by the author’s fear of death. He says “”The bones are something left behind, a form of memory, I try to treat that person on my studio floor with respect.”

via DesignObserver

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Mosquito Monument Found in Russian Village

If this thing was for real, you’d need a lot more than a can of Raid, to hold on to your blood.

Back in 2007, Biologists from the Tyumen Regional Museum, who were examining the Noyabrsk area, for creating an eco-tourism route, for kids, stumbled across what they considered the most bizarre find, in their careers, in Lata village. A giant mosquito, as tall as an average person, was staring them in the face.

Luckily for them, this particular blood-sucker was just a sculpture, made from scrap metal. Local artist, Valery Chaliy built this strange monument, using old car and truck parts. It’s not exactly a monument, since we’re talking about a pest that no one would really miss, but the artist admits he was inspired by the millions of mosquitoes inhabiting the neighboring swamps.

Photos via svintuss

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Mike Libby’s Steampunk Insects

Stop! Don’t even think about screaming “Photoshopped!” because Mike Libby’s Insect Lab is 100% real. And so are his incredible Steampunk insects.

Mike began his unusual project on a day like any other, when he found an intact dead beetle. Thinking about how the little bug functioned as a mechanical device, he remembered he had also found an old wristwatch and decided to combine the two. After dissecting the beetle and mounting the mechanical parts, he realized he quite liked his new craft and decided to stick to it.

Now Mike Libby creates all kinds of Steampunk insects, from scorpions to ordinary beetles and dragonflies. He only works with non-endangered species from all around the world, fitting them with mechanisms from antique watches as well as old typewriter and sewing-machine parts.

Check out Mike Libby’s Insect Lab and feel free to email him if you want to purchase any of his Steampunk wonders or place a special order.

Steampunk-insects11

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Crucified Jesus Made of Toast

British artist Adam Sheldon recreated Jesus’ crucifixion using some pieces of burned toast and a scraping knife. His work of art is now on display at the Anglican Church of St Peter, in Lincs.

33-year-old Adam Sheldon took on the project at the request of his mother, who worships at St. Peter’s Church. Before starting work on his 1.8 ,meters long, 1.1 meters wide masterpiece, Adam scraped the Last Supper on three pieces of toast, to perfect his technique.

He used a regular toaster to burn the pieces of bread, then dried and flattened them so they would fit in a giant frame. Using a scraping knife he managed to create the lighter parts of the artwork, and darkened the background with a blowtorch.

At first, the reverend and parishioners were stunned by Sheldon’s creation, because they didn’t expect something this…original, but now they’re thrilled to have such art on the walls of their church. The artwork was so skillfully scraped, some believed it was actually painted on tiles, before realizing the tiles are really pieces of bread.

The toast crucifixion of Jesus will be on display at the Anglican Church of Saint Peter until January 30, if the rats don’t get to it by then.

toast-Jesus

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Knitted Dissection

Ah, these knitted artworks take me back to my high-school biology classes. Come to think of it, these memories are kind of gross…

The Crafty Hedgehog,  a skilled knitting artist, decided to immortalize one of the most exciting moments in the life of a high-school student, the dissection of a frog or rat. Entitled “Knitting in Biology 101”, his project depicts dissected animals, made out of wool and pinned to a dissecting tray of a cork frame. They’re not glued,so you can pick them up and examine the work on both sides.

You’ll be glad to know The Crafty Hedgehog has taken his knitting art even further and is now making “dissecting” fetal pigs and even…the Easter Bunny. If you like this sort of thing, you can order one via The Crafty Hedgehog’s profile on Etsy.

via worldfamousdesignjunkies

knitted-dissection

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