23-year-old Julia Koceva has taken the internet by storm with her impressive drawings created using an old technique known as stippling – creating pattern and applying varying degrees of solidity or shading to it by using small dots.

A criminologist by day, Koceva spends her nights working on her amazing drawings. She takes between 40 and 100 hours to finish a piece, painstakingly applying tiny black dots to a large piece of paper, using nothing but a ballpoint pen. As Alphonso Dunn, author of “Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide,” says, stippling creates a unique texture but requires patience and a meticulous approach. It’s a technique that requires nerves of steel and mountains of patience, but the end results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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Featuring perfectly replicated seams, soles and shoelaces, as well as impressively realistic finish, these life-size chocolate shoes seem made of genuine brown leather.

The “Gentleman’s Radiance” chocolate line is the creation of master chocolatier Motohiro Okai of Rihga Royal Hotel’s chocolate boutique L’éclat, in Osaka, Japan. Each leather show measures 26 centimeters (10.2 inches) in length, and is crafted exclusively from chocolate, including the insole and laces. The shoes come in three different shades of brown leather – light, dark and red-brown – and have a realistic shiny finish which Okai achieved after a painstaking process of trial and error.

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Japanese artist Ei Wada discovered that old cathode ray tube television sets make great percussion instruments by mistake, but he managed to turn this accidental discovery into an art. Today, his unique Braun Tube Jazz Band is famous all over the world.

Wada first became interested in percussion music at age four, after attending a Gamelan music performance in Indonesia. He was impressed by the sound of the percussion instruments, recalling that he felt “taken to another world”. This memory stuck with him, and a few years later, while tinkering with some old cassette tapes, he realized that the off-key sounds they produced were very similar to the Gamelan music that had made such a big impression on him. Since then, he has been focusing on producing otherworldly sounds with obsolete gadgets that people usually throw away.

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In a time when ivory poaching has gotten so bad that it threatens to wipe out several animal species, a young Dutch designer is creating “egalitarian jewelry” made of our very own ivory – teeth.

Lucie Majerus first got the idea for her “human ivory” collection after having her wisdom teeth removed. She kept them and soon realized they would make great material for a statement jewelry collection. “Why wouldn’t we value our own material instead of the precious material from other species?” she rhetorically asks. “In opposition to materialistic values, “Human Ivory” acts metaphorically for having our own value in ourselves. A suggestion to cherish our own “Material” instead of other species’ teeth and reconsider conventional preciousness. What if we mine our own ivory and turn it into pearls?”

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New Mexico-based artist Justin Crowe first incorporated cremated human ashes into a dinnerware set, last year, as part of an art project, but after his friends learned about it and asked him to create bespoke items for them, he decided to turn the idea into a business. Today, his company, Chronicle Cremation Design, offers people the chance to keep their loved ones close by having their ashes incorporated into everyday items like coffee cups, bowls or candle holders.

“I wanted to create a dinnerware set that infuses a sense of mortality into everyday life,” Crow says about his original idea of mixing human ashes into tableware. In 2015, he purchased 200 human bones from a bone dealer, crushed them into a fine powder and mixed them into a coating glaze for a set of functional plates, cups and bowls. He ended up using them for an unconventional dinner party, with the guests eating off of repurposed human remains.

Interestingly, while searching for human bones for his artistic project, Crow put up an ad on Craigslist, asking for about two cups of ashes for $35. He got three responses on the first day,one of which was from a woman who threatened to have him investigated, quoting the Bible and telling him he was going to hell. “It’s a really polarizing idea,” the artist admits.

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True to the saying “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, a Russian driver turned a badly dented car door into a beautiful map of the Altai mountains.

The details of the accident are unclear, but by the looks of things, the artistically-gifted driver got a bit to close to a parked BMW SUV and dented one of the car doors pretty badly. According to Slavorum, Russia doesn’t have mandatory car insurance, so in most cases, drivers have to pay for repairs themselves. But instead of getting a fresh paint job, our man went for a much cooler alternative – turning the car car door into an artistic map of the Altai Mountains. As you can see in the photos below, the dent actually blend into the artwork perfectly, either enhancing the shading effect of the mountains or acting as lines in the map.

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Last year, a couple of Japanese digital artists shocked the world when they revealed that their daughter Saya, a young beautiful Japanese schoolgirl, wasn’t actually a real person, but an ultra-realistic computer generated model. The two have been working on making Saya look even more life-like ever since, and a recently revealed photo of their “daughter” has once again blown people’ minds.

Saya 2016 takes computer-generated realism to new heights. Everything about her, from the strands of her dark hair and the reflection in her eyes, to the life-like look of her skin is almost perfect, and I find it difficult to believe that most people could tell that she wasn’t a real person if they didn’t know her story beforehand.

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Most people may think they’re barking mad, but that’s not stopping dramatic duo Alex Bailey and Krõõt Juurak from putting on theatrical shows aimed exclusively at pets.

Actors Alex Bailey and Krõõt Juurak use their own research as well as consultations with pet psychologists to put together artistic performances for their animal audience. They usually travel to a pet’s home and try to connect with it by using various techniques, including “non-human voice and body languages”. While their performances are not always interactive, the two admit that some animals, especially young ones, join them during their act. So far they have performed more than 80 times at the homes of pets in Zürich, Erlangen, Berlin and Vienna, and are currently promoting their unique services in Bristol, England, in the hopes of gaining new fans.

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Looking at the majestic wolf below, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not actually a real live animal, but a handmade wool felt sculpture created by talented Japanese artist Terumi Ohta.

Born in Hokkaido, Ohta grew up surrounded by flowers and animals, and her love for nature has transcended into her amazing wool felt art. Although she can use a simple needle and a handful of wool to create anything she puts her mind to, her hyper-realistic sculptures of wild and domestic animals are definitely the most impressive items in her extensive collection.

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Toronto-based artist Alexis Fraser, a.k.a. Lipstick Lex, is giving the phrase “makeup artist” a whole new meaning. She creates incredibly detailed portraits by kissing the canvas and leaving lipstick prints in just the right places.

Fraser specializes in oil painting, but has also mastered a unique art form that she calls “kiss print pointilism”, which has her applying lipstick to her lips and repeatedly kissing the canvas until the desired image is formed. For the finer details, she draws with the lipstick directly onto the canvas, but most of the work is definitely done by her lips.

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In 2014, Israeli artist Sigalit Landau submerged a 19th century-style gown into the lifeless waters of the Dead Sea, for a unique photo project. The dress was retrieved after three months, and as you can see in the photos below, the transformation is quite significant.

For her latest project, an eight-part photo series called Salt Bride, Landau checked in on the dress multiple times over the three month period, capturing its slow transformation into a magical salt crystal. As the salt in the water adhered to the fabric, the black dress gradually became stiffer and changed its color from charcoal black to pearly white. “It looks like snow, like sugar, like death’s embrace,” the artist poetically said in a statement.

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Looking at the detailed leopard portrait below, you’d be inclined to think Franziska Treptow is a photographer. Every detail, from the tiny hairs of the animal’s fur to the reflection in its eyes, is so perfect that it’s almost impossible to believe that the young German artist paints or draws every one of her artworks.

Franziska’s ideas start as sketches and photos of wildlife. Using her skills in digital photo manipulation technology (Photoshop), she creates a digital model for her works, which helps her become aware of the composition and accentuation of light and shadow. She then sketches that model on paper or canvas and uses pencils or paints to create the ultra-realistic animal portraits exclusively by hand. The whole process, can take anywhere from a few hours to more than a month, depending on the complexity of the project. The end result is always breathtaking.

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Wang Xiaojiu, a 31-year-old barber from Jilin city, China, doesn’t simply sweep shorn hair off the floor of his hair salon and dump it in the trash. At least not before painstakingly arranging it to create highly detailed works of art.

Seen from a far, Wang’s masterpieces look drawn with a pencil or charcoal, but a closer inspection reveals that they are made out of carefully arranged clipped hair. The talented barber told China Daily that he always thought throwing away leftover hair seemed like a pity, so one day he decided to do something creative with it instead. Armed with a hair brush and a plastic card, he started the piles of sheared hair on the floor of his salon into intricate portraits of popular cartoon and comic characters and, mythological heroes, and more.

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At just 26 years old, Tony Greenhand is considered the master of artistic joint rolling. From smokable renditions of Pokemon and popular superheroes, to birds and dinosaurs, there is virtually no shape that he couldn’t roll a joint into.

Greenhand has been a crafty guy for as long as he can remember, but he wasn’t always good at rolling joints. His first attempt, as a teen living in rural Washington state, was a total disaster. It was supposed to be a basic cone-shaped joint, but after living too much saliva on the rolling paper, it turned out hideously deformed. He remembers feeling pretty humiliated, but he didn’t let the experience bring him down. He bought an ounce of weed and spent an entire weekend rolling up every last bit of it. By Sunday night, he had mastered the conical joint, but that was only the beginning.

After dropping out of high-school, Tony became more involved in the underground weed business, and his reputation for perfect rolls made him the go-to guy for joints among his grower friends. He soon started experimenting with more complex shapes, and he says that his first creation was a “non-spectacular” rocket. Soon he was creating alligator or dragon-shaped joints, and after a friend urged him to post a photo of a pipe-shaped joint on Reddit – a site he had never even heard of – he managed to blow the minds of potheads who never knew artistic joint rolling was actually a thing.

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“Human” might be overstating it a bit, as Graham is actually a sculpture of a person who might be able to survive a car crash that would otherwise kill any normal human being. He was created by artist Patricia Piccinini in collaboration with a  a leading trauma surgeon and a crash investigation expert, for a new Australian road safety campaign.

Graham’s gigantic, helmet-like head, the absence of a neck, his bizarre, hoof-like feet, as well as other unnatural features reflect a human body evolved to sustain the forces involved in auto collisions. According to Joe Calafiore, CEO of Australia’s Transport Accident Commission, Graham is supposed to draw awareness to our vulnerability to vehicle collisions and hopefully reduce the number of deaths and injuries on the road. “People can survive running at full pace into a wall but when you’re talking about collisions involving vehicles, the speeds are faster, the forces are greater and the chances of survival are much slimmer,” Calafiore said. “Cars have evolved a lot faster than humans and graham helps us understand why we need to improve every aspect of our roads system to protect ourselves from our own mistakes.”

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